Study in Yellow

2018

BROOCHES (jar lid / plastic cap / aluminium can / shotgun cartridge / plastic straw, stainless steel)

These brooches are the culmination of reflections and observations on how I use found objects.

Very often, the use of discarded items and fragments falls into the more general discourses centred around the re-use of trash and / or the re-contextualisation of objects. The ecological aspect, as well as the one about re-writing of personal narratives through objects, are very present in all my work. However, I do not wish to re-position the objects into new contexts or give them a new life and, quite the opposite, I wish to bring in the existing contexts and significance of these fragments in order to help me highlight the narrative I am trying to convey.

The particular objects of this small series have been mounted with brooch attachments that are nearly invisible when worn. The objects are, and need to be shown for, what they are. Through positioning them as jewellery, or as part of jewellery, I do not wish for them to be different or better: instead it is their inherent qualities, provenance and the context / experience of their retrieval that provide for me the important materials in the stories I need to tell.

And so, why yellow? The yellow is part of a wider reflection on how colour seems to play an important part in my work in ways I have not necessarily given it credit for yet. Some of these objects were chosen instinctively out of a display of several weeks' worth of found and collected material (which is not necessarily a lot of objects for me) resting on one of my benches. I had to concede that their colour played a part in their standing out, to the point that I had to add two (the straw and the auminium can) from my existing materials. On the same line, then, time and place of collection instead did not play a role in this assemblage (the can was one of my first collected objects in the street outside my house from years back, and the straw I had picked up on a trip to Munich just a year before), but texture and tinge of colour did (as I eliminated the sponges, organic and not bright yellow, from my original choice).

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