Jewellery Stories from the North. A Lecture by Nanna Melland

Warm clothes will protect you from the cold, but there is no protection from the darkness. It will seep into your mind like a thick fog. As nature hibernates, people try their best to make it through the winter. It is not an exercise for beginners. For most Norwegians, it is a lifelong challenge. Under these conditions, a small but thriving community of jewellery makers create their work alongside Norway’s other creative expressions such as its famed black metal bands, the poet Henrik Ibsen, the painter Edvard Munch, and the queen of contemporary jewellery, Tone Vigeland. The darkness and cold are certainly a powerful force for creativity, as magical as the colours of the Aurora Borealis pulsating in the sky!”

When: 19 November, Friday, 6-7 pm.

Nanna Melland (1969, Oslo, Norway) holds degrees from the Academy of Fine arts in Munich, a master’s degree from the University of Oslo in Social Anthropology and History of Religion, and is a journeyman goldsmith. In 2017 Melland was a guest professor at Burg Gibichenstein in Halle, Germany, and is now based in Oslo, Norway.
In 2008 Melland received the Norwegian Craft prize. She works with various materials and explores a wide variety of subject matter, including intrauterine devices (IUDs), gold nails, cast pigs’ hearts, orchids in lead, aluminum airplanes, and atom bomb rings in tin. Despite its eclecticism, her work paradoxically attains a coherent whole, and is represented in Nordenfjeldske Arts and Craft Museum in Trondheim, Norway. Melland has taken part in many group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, including at the Pinakotek Moderne in Munich, the Schmuck fair, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnheim, the Paris Museum of Modern Art, the Jewellery Museum in Pforzheim, the New York Museum of Arts and Design, and The Dowse Art Museum in New Zealand.