honours explorations

Yonic, Gestaltwerk 1:2 Melbourne 2010, Embellishment, Jewellery Therapy My current investigation is, as it has always been, the body. Jewellers consistently site the body as source of inspiring dialogue - objects we create are realised in their placement. A fresh understanding of this has re-informed my praxis, contextually from post-structural feminist sensibilities, to seek out a dynamic interplay/potential for jewellery as a site of investigation. My current body of work is exploring the unique aspects of the body and the manners in which that might form an aesthetic language. From a past practice of being drawn to explore materiality as a source of tension, I have developed a desire to broaden notions of jewellery as wearable and indeed tangible, particularly with relevance to the body as subjective. Languages of the body are primordial, individual, simultaneously incomprehensible yet instantly semiotic. What do objects speak to, and of, the wearer? My work investigates these languages and asks the viewer/wearer to translate according to their variable context. Continuing on from early explorations of sensual aestheticism, I moved on to greater understandings of the problematic nature of certain representations and loaded materials. Having a personal and professional desire to explore the potential in subverting these limitations, I sought a new modality. One that involved intuited gendered, social and racial readings, yet expanded on these to composite an investigation of the body as unique and communicative. My current work centres on how we communicate or are communicated through the body in its expansive forms: through therapeutic means, cosmetic blemishes, or the aesthetic we choose, or don't choose, to project. It is an experimentation with intuition, with deconstruction, and works within socially and institutionally enshrined parameters. Materials speak before they are touched, designed or manipulated. They can speak of the body and to the body. Herein gendered materiality can also be variably understood, particularly dependent on its aesthetic language. The Yonic series is an articulation of these concepts. It seeks viewer dialogue to realise understanding, each piece communicating a variable aesthetic language, the effect of which is fully comprehended on mass. In its precious and sensual arrangement, Yonic serves an almost archival function to herald the natural uniqueness of the vagina. Upon completion, the work realised a synergy of past and present concerns in my practice: sensual materiality, which highlights an eco-feminist sensibility, combined with a deconstruction of the body and its unique formations. Simultaneous to material creation, my work has continued questioning languages of the body through a negation of direct object-hood. Adornment evolved to be increasingly focused on the body communicating its own design. Indeed the body as site of investigation is loaded with new potentials of language beyond the ones we instinctively read. It speaks for itself, yet depends on interpretation. In Embellishment, the blemish (imperfection/mole/scar) is 'set', made precious and translated into site of adornment, simultaneously referencing constellations, the cosmetic and the surgical. In Jewellery Therapy, internal blockage points variably react to composite a communication of 'jewellery'. The work has wit in acknowledging its loaded use of therapeutic devices, and in such references the notion of jewellery as 'shopping therapy'. Another exploration still in progress, titled Gestaltwerk, explores the language of body adornment, post-modern aestheticism and the functioning of bodily dynamics to understand how we create and sustain our identities.