Flip Side: Jewelry from the JamFactory

Velvet da Vinci Gallery in San Francisco presents “Flip Side: Jewelry from JamFactory” a show featuring eight jewelers from Adelaide, Australia.

For the last 30 years, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design Centre, located in Adelaide, Southern Australia, has been a place for the design, production, exhibition and sale of work by leading and emerging Australian designers / makers, with a focus on ceramics, furniture, metal and glass. 

Sue Lorraine, Creative Director of the Metals Design Studio and curator of Flip Side, explains that the intention of this exhibition was to push these artists into a new dimension of their work. “There is always more than one point of view, always several ways to look at something, from the back and the front, the inside and the outside, the upside and the downside, the safe side and the flip side.” However, instead of creating drastically new pieces for the exhibition, Lorraine found that their mature and assured practice has allowed them to push the boundaries of their everyday work.

Tassia Joannides uses the common zipper as her medium. She has given this one-dimensional form body and substance. The armbands intentionally blur the boundaries between the inside and out. By unzipping and zipping they become part of the wearer, an intimate experience.

Mellisa Turner uses stainless steel to create fluid and soft forms of beauty. There is no front or back, no pin back, no pendant, no ring shank, only fluid forms. These forms stand as an act of defiance to the jewelry world, without a wearable function.

Sally Mahony uses primarily stainless steel in her work. She manipulates the material to both extremes, making it corrode and shine to a satiny, seductive black. The brooches peel away from the body exposing fabric or metal beneath.

Kath Inglis again is a manipulator of materials. She carves PVC into three-dimensional wearable sculptures. Kath is inspired by the colors of shadows and reflections in water. Just as water has no top or bottom, no starting or ending point, her jewelry is a continuous ripple on the wearer.

Lauren Simeoni’s brooches reflect the impact materials have on the world. She is a lover of materials and the impact these material leave. In this series of brooches she has printed nostalgic images on aluminum and reveals a time of personal innocence.

Sim Luttin made this body of work while recently living in the U.S. As a visitor she was hyper-aware of her surroundings. Her necklaces reflect and magnify nature with their seed-like forms as vessels strung from dark beads.

Alisa Dewhurst and Belinda Newick have used the body as their starting points. Alisa crochets necklaces illustrating the repetitive genetic message of DNA, the building material that makes up each individual. She mimics this process in crocheted wire. Belinda uses the necklace to discuss the fragility, fertility and fecundity of the female anatomy.