Sigurd Bronger lecture: All About Me

Artist list

Sigurd Bronger

Sigurd Bronger, Norwegian jewellery artist, translates his fascination with machines and instruments into excitingly constructed pieces of jewellery. He transforms natural materials and mundane utilitarian objects into meticulously crafted, complex and sophisticated constructions in such a way that their significance and beauty are enhanced.

Sigurd Bronger (*1957) lives and works in Oslo. He has shown work at numerous international group shows and has lectured and taught at distinguished art colleges, including the Royal College of Art in London.

The love of machines and mechanisms which are no longer used is not merely an expression for humanity's nostalgic search for the past, but also a comment on our present-day lack of sensibility: Our competence to join beauty with practicality. "The industrial object which becomes an aesthetic value is rendered unusable. It becomes useless beauty, instruments without function." (Octavio Paz) (...)
Mechanically built machines reveal their functions, in contrast to closed digital systems. There is also the possibility of opening a small mechanical clock or an enormous turbine and dismantling it piece by piece until the objects no longer exist except as pieces of flattered ornament. The perfect form of every part lies open to be enjoyed and to awake fascination. We admire the horologist who carefully checks, polishes and repairs in order to make the object work again. Function does not cease in the world of mechanics, but occasionally time leaves some of these machines behind. (...)

Bronger's work bears witness to the machine, air travel and impossible combinations. He uses a collage technique, which although not as profound as the William Borroughs novel 'The Soft Machine' is rather more like its namesake, the music group who wished to unit elements from rock and jazz and discovered a third possibility and reality. Another role model is Panamarenko, the Belgian artist whose poetic objects visualise the memories of boyhood.

Rigmor Hovland in Sigurd Bronger, 1998