A Sense of Place: New Jewellery from Northern Lands

Artist list

Tobias Alm (Sweden), Rut-Malin Barklund (Sweden), Sara Borgegård Älgå (Sweden), Grace Girvan (Scotland), Ingjerd Hanevold (Norway) Caroline Holt (Scotland), Hildur ýr Jónsdóttir (Iceland), Jenny Klemming (Sweden), Agnes Larsson (Sweden), Beth Legg (Scotland), Helena Lehtinen (Finland), Helga Mogensen (Iceland), Eija Mustonen (Finland), Per Suntum (Denmark), Nelli Tanner (Finland), Tarja Tuupanen (Finland).

This exhibition explores the relationship contemporary jewellers have with their environment. Six nations are involved in the project, each at the northern edge of European jewellery practice, and each with their own individual cultural histories and heritage. 

As part of a doctorate research project, sixteen emerging, and established, jewellers from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Scotland were asked to make two new works. The first piece was informed by a box of collected objects and materials that each artist gathered from an environment which is significant to them. This collection became a research process towards their tangible interpretation of place. 

These 'Topophilia' (love of a place) boxes were then swapped, anonymously and at random, for another artist’s box that formed the stimuli for the second piece of jewellery. The work is displayed in pairs alongside the corresponding box of source materials illustrating the different approaches taken by artists with the same stimuli. Visitors can compare how the artist’s work is affected by working from the objects they have chosen and from objects that have been selected by someone else. 

The collections in the boxes and the finished work are poetic responses to feelings of belonging through the language of making. This project is a celebration of our cultural links through our lived experience of our environment; cementing the bonds of cultural identity through collected and crafted material objects and forming new connections to our place in the world.