UN/FAMILIARITIES
“If I put precious materials on a painting, does it become more valuable? Is it still a painting? Is it wall jewellery? Is it collage? Is it more beautiful?” – Elfi Spiewack, 2023
They are mysterious, these works. Incongruous conflations of familiarity and strangeness, depth-less image and three-dimensional object, art and jewellery.
The settings are the timeworn, colour-skewed reproductions of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantic paintings with their dramatic cloudscapes, nostalgic pastoralism and suggestions of intimacy, a canon of familiar images ejected from their place above the mantelpiece or beside the bed to gather dust and disfiguring light in the $10 bin of the op shop or garage sale.
Into these, jeweller Elfi Spiewack embeds set gems, slivered bone and polished stone, using the materials and techniques of fine jewellery to add a startling vitality, disrupting assumptions of medium, value and aesthetic norms.
The choice of materials is subtle, dictated by the mood, colour and narrative of the imagery, while violating the norms of both art and jewellery. If the value of art is determined by the reputation of the artist, and the value of jewellery is dictated by the materials used, here the ‘art’, discoloured and discarded, is pierced with precious metals and the natural beauty of agate, jasper, basalt and shell, set according to the highest standards of the jeweller’s craft.
But the paradoxes of this exhibition also evoke the everyday strangenesses of Covid times when, as she says, the old story was disturbed, nothing made sense: “It was a new reality, the story re-written.”
Sally Blundell, September 2023
They are mysterious, these works. Incongruous conflations of familiarity and strangeness, depth-less image and three-dimensional object, art and jewellery.
The settings are the timeworn, colour-skewed reproductions of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantic paintings with their dramatic cloudscapes, nostalgic pastoralism and suggestions of intimacy, a canon of familiar images ejected from their place above the mantelpiece or beside the bed to gather dust and disfiguring light in the $10 bin of the op shop or garage sale.
Into these, jeweller Elfi Spiewack embeds set gems, slivered bone and polished stone, using the materials and techniques of fine jewellery to add a startling vitality, disrupting assumptions of medium, value and aesthetic norms.
The choice of materials is subtle, dictated by the mood, colour and narrative of the imagery, while violating the norms of both art and jewellery. If the value of art is determined by the reputation of the artist, and the value of jewellery is dictated by the materials used, here the ‘art’, discoloured and discarded, is pierced with precious metals and the natural beauty of agate, jasper, basalt and shell, set according to the highest standards of the jeweller’s craft.
But the paradoxes of this exhibition also evoke the everyday strangenesses of Covid times when, as she says, the old story was disturbed, nothing made sense: “It was a new reality, the story re-written.”
Sally Blundell, September 2023