Andrea Wagner: Subset Synergism - Tales of Migration

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Andrea Wagner

In today's multi-cultural world many people live in a place where they were not born. This presents challenges as well as cause for celebration for those who must fuse more than one culture into their psyche. For jewelry artist Andrea Wagner, the expression of her own experience is palpable in her most recent collection of jewelry.
 
Born in Germany, raised in Canada, and residing for 16 years in Amsterdam, Andrea has a trifecta of cultures to meld into her identity and she chooses her work to explain how that has coalesced for her.
 
Monika Auch, a studio artist and editor of the Dutch journal kM, has likened the rectangular forms Andrea has constructed of porcelain, resin, silver and occasional touches of red paint to cardboard boxes used for moving which are "skillfully grafted together." But perhaps the imagery evokes even stronger feelings-they are metaphors for the spaces that enclose the different worlds Andrea has inhabited which remain separate but contiguous. They are fused together to make a whole, albeit one with parts that contrast visually through color and construction. Some of the pieces are so architectural in nature they also hint at the landscape of the cities Andrea has lived in.

The use of red embellishment in many of her pieces is the delicate thread that ties the separate elements together. It runs through the parts until they are one, much as the migrant melds the cultures of where she has come from, where she has been and where she is now. It is fitting that the piece entitled Double Dutch, is a double entendre, representing a North American children's jump rope game and the artist's long sojourn in Holland.
 
In her piece Re-Invent Andrea seems to be telling us that the essence of a person remains the same no matter where they are, yet the way in which one presents oneself may change to fit into one's environment. The two sections of this piece of jewelry appear to be the "female and male" halves of a mold, and yet we can see that if there was an attempt made to fold one into the other, they would not quite fit. In the same way the immigrant begins to blend into the population where she has put down roots, yet small clues to where she has come from make the fit not quite perfect.
 
As Andrea says, "The overlapping and merging of different cultures creates a result that is more than merely the sum of their parts. At the same time this process breaks up established cultural forms and re-arranges them into new and stronger patterns.