Life Savers

Artist list

Kim Buck, Mari Ishikawa, Sara Borgegård Älgå

The Most Secret Gallery – a new gallery for art jewellery

Can jewellery save lives? If we are willing to accept lifesavers in cork or foam as a body adornment, the answer is yes. But when Kim Buck now presents 60 boxes with the word Life Savers engraved in the glass, the life support they offer is probably more of symbolic significance. Although the boxes and their content have similarities with both lifesavers on the wall of boathouses and emergency brake boxes on trains, this alarming symbol is also infused with a good dose of humour. Behind the clear glass that covers the metal boxes are pendants. They are made of cork and have a string in bright orange. Jewellery are still used as amulets or talismans to bring people good luck. Surprisingly many can tell that they have a ring or a locket that they always put on when going to exam or job interview. The important role these pieces play in their owners' lives, is what Kim Buck hopes that contemporary art jewellery also can achieve. In the series Life Savers he therefore offers a talisman for our time.

Life Savers can be seen when Kim Buck on Friday 10 October at 5 pm opens the door to the new space The Most Secret Gallery. The name is ironic and refers to the difficulty to understand the language of contemporary jewellery if one is not familiar with the ideas behind this specialized art practice. The goal is to create greater interest and understanding of contemporary jewellery through arranging artist talks and three to four exhibitions a year. To participate with him at the opening exhibition, he has invited Sara Borgegård Älgå from Sweden and Mari Ishikawa from Japan.

Mari Ishikawa lives in Munich in Germany, but in her jewellery she pulls strong demands on her Japanese roots. This applies whether they are about memories, or based on concrete experiences of nature and architecture. Most of her pieces have some red parts. Red is a key colour in Japanese culture, and it can symbolize the sun set, holy places, something ritual or ties between people. In a series of brooches with memory as a common theme she has included elements from watches. Their meaning is ambiguous. Perhaps they hint at our ability to travel freely in time in our memories and dreams, or perhaps they are to be read as a melancholic reminder that with time memories often fade.

Sara Borgegård Älgå shows a series of necklaces entitled Brick, Scale and Concrete. The materials are iron and steel, but the inspiration has beside industrial architecture in general been an old brick wall. The neck cords are composed of many thin threads and provide a soft contrast to the industrial and raw expression of the metal parts. The yarn is the same that is used as warp threads in tissues, and as such refers to a textile handicraft culture. With paint she applies a decorative dimension, at the same time as the metal has been reworked to give them a patina. As it has been written about her work: “The pieces can be decorative, but never just decoration; they also tell a story." This statement is true not only for her pieces, but is a common denominator for all the three exhibiting jewellery artists.

- Jorunn Veiteberg