PhD examination exhibition, ADspace, University of New South Wales, Art & Design, Gadigal (Sydney)
3-7 November 2014
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Also exhibited at Studio 20/17, Gadigal (Sydney)
20 October - 7 November 2015
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Wearing it lightly by Julie Ewington, October 2015
The chain is one of the most ancient of all jewellery forms. One loop meets another loop, then another, and so it goes on. But the variety of these loopings is infinite, as is the form itself.
Zoë Veness is the current mistress of this art. Look at the sinuous sophistication of these beautiful looped paper chains, and the variety of forms: Coil Loop: Green 2013 is a single looped structure, and Double Loop: Red 2012 is a simple doubling of a longer finer structure. Double Loop: Grey 2012-2013, on the other hand, has the original chain folding back and looping over on itself to make a far more complicated and playful form. There is evident delight here, set into the twisting folding energies of these folded forms.
However, the apparently effortless simplicity of these necklaces is structured by a set of intricate and idiosyncratic calculations, as rapidly becomes evident on closer inspection. What you see here are complex, even complicated, structures. The loops are all based on the rigorous application of a number of patterns, one might say formulae in the mathematical sense – and there are indeed codes for their making. Yet this arduous process, this embodied mathematics, is always subordinate to the making of the jewellery; both mathematics and paper sit lightly on the body.
With this work, Veness set out to make jewellery that approached the condition of sculpture; she questioned the multiple distinctions between jewellery and sculpture, and to thought through the ways the body and the plinth work as supports. Finally, though, in exploring the never-ending form of the chain, Zoë Veness invokes the impossibility of resolving her own question one way or another – is jewellery ever fully independent of the body? Are these objects autonomous or supplemental to the body? Perhaps they are always both – like the constant transactions of the chain itself.
Photos by Orlando Luminere