Transforma(c)tions: Matter Dialogues

Artist list

Natalie Asher-Martin, Lili Barglowska, Sofie Boons, Stephen Bottomley, Naima Cheniya, Lin Cheung, Katharina Dettar, Veronika Dika, Veroni Dimitrov, Marina Ito, Anastasia Kan, Syd Kendall, Emily Murphy, Rozana Piper, Rebecca Prenga, Lily Straker, Adi Toch, Grace Wilson, Nicholas Yiannarakis, Yitong Zhang

Between light and dark, solid and liquid, stable and unstable, matter operates as a mediator, forms through which meaning, symbolic, and metaphysical metamorphoses unfold. They speak in rhythms of transformation, growth, shimmer, and resistance.

The exhibition unfolds across four cabinets on the museum’s ground floor. Each zone invites you to engage in a dialogue with matter, focusing on light, form, growth, and energy, pairing mineral specimens from the collection with contemporary jewellery and metal work objects that respond, resonate, or interrupt. The show invites visitors into a multisensory dialogue between matter formations and their enacted contemporary artistic (re)interpretations.


Opening days and hours for the Schmuck in Munich 2026 event.
Tue-Fri 12:00-16:00 h.
Sat-Sun 13:00-17:00 h.

Special event/Opening:  06.03, 17:30-20:00 h.
 
Entrance from Marianne-v.-Werefkin-Weg.
Facilitators: Stephen Bottomley and Melanie Kaliwoda.


Zone 1 Energetics
In this zone, the vitality of matter is investigated through function and force. Crystals are essential to modern technologies, from semiconductors to timekeeping. Quartz generates an electric charge under mechanical stress, making it a cornerstone of modern electronics. Silicon is the backbone of modern computing, its crystalline structure enabling the flow and control of electrons that power our digital world. In this zone, crystals are not passive components but explored as active collaborators, of which energetic potentials can be reinterpreted beyond utility. Artists' works create a dialogue of how crystals shape our technological realities while inviting new narratives of energy, resonance, and transformation. 

Artists: Stephen Bottomley, Lin Cheung, Katharina Dettar, Adi Toch, Grace Wilson, Marina Ito, Lili Barglowska, Nicholas Yiannarakis, Syd Kendall


Zone 2 ‘Metallurgics’
In this zone, transformation is continuous, occurring through the negotiations between rawness and refinement, solidity and fluidity, use and refusal, concealment and disclosure. These tensions emerge from both structuralist and phenomenological thought, converging into a quiet and formal reconciliation. The objects by Yitong Zhang are conceived not as metaphors for language, but as metalanguage. They explore how metal might structure its own discourses through rhythm, balance, form, and resonance. These works are neither representations nor objects for interpretation. They stand, murmur, and compose, being encountered on their own terms, allowing sensory-emotional experience to unfold in the viewers.


Zone 3 Physics
Physics is the domain of forces, growth, and emergence. In this zone, transformation is not metaphorical, it is literal, observable, and alive. Using low-temperature, low-pressure techniques, crystals grow molecule by molecule, a process Sofie Boons has adopted as an artistic method. Here, crystals are co-creators, forming within metal structures. Natural facets are celebrated as unique features, while spontaneous nucleation reveals how crystals respond to, grow around, and emerge from metal forms. This is matter in motion, where physics meets aesthetics.


Zone 4 Optics
In this zone, matter reveals itself through light, its presence, absence, and persistence, emerging as a period of visibility, a flash, a shimmer, a slow afterglow.  In nature, fluorescence describes the phenomenon where certain minerals absorb ultraviolet light and immediately emit visible light, creating a vivid glow that vanishes when the light source is removed; phosphorescent crystals continue to glow even after the source fades, releasing stored energy over time. The engineered crystals created by BREVALOR extend this phenomenon, enabling makers to sculpt with light. In this showcase of the work by British Academy of Jewellery students, light becomes duration, and matter asserts a time-based vitality. Light reveals how matter speaks: the minerals absorb, hold, and respond, as active agents participating in perception, allowing light to become part of their life and temporal dimension.

Artists: Anastasia Kan, Emily Murphy, Lily Straker, Naima Cheniya, Natalie Asher-Martin, Rebecca Prenga, Rozana Piper, Veroni Dimitrov, Veronika Dika


About the Curators:
Sofie Boons is a jeweller working as Senior Lecturer in Design Crafts at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). She recently completed a four-year Crafts Council Research Fellowship at the Centre for Print Research and completed her PhD titled ‘Neo-gemstones: an Alchemical Jeweller’s exploration of lab-grown crystals’. Sofie worked as the Head of Academy for the British Academy of Jewellery. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2013 she has continually exhibited her work internationally under the moniker ‘The Alchemical Jeweller’.
 
Yitong Zhang is a multi-award-winning practitioner, researcher and poet in metal. Prior to pursuing her PhD at the Glasgow School of Art, Yitong graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2022 and the GSA with first-class honours in 2020, during which she also completed an academic exchange at the California College of the Arts. Yitong’s artistic practice and research have developed internationally across exhibitions, curations, lectures, and symposiums. In 2021, Yitong held a transdisciplinary exhibition in collaboration with 6 well-known Chinese poets, ‘Jewellery is a Poem’, in Beijing, which inspired her ongoing inquiry into how the forms and methodologies of poetry might inform the investigation into the poeticity of contemporary craft and metal language.

About the Museum: 
The Mineralogische Staatssammlung Munchen is one of the best German mineralogical collections. The team of the Bavarian State Collection for Mineralogy is, in addition to the curatorial tasks for the maintenance of the collections, also engaged in the mediation of mineralogical and geoscientific topics in the Museum Mineralogia Munich. Dr. Melanie Kaliwoda is the Senior Conservator and Deputy Director of the museum.