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Animal Kingdom: Hybrid Beasts & Modern Tales in Contemporary Jewellery. Spotlight artworks by Klimt02

Published: 03.09.2025
Animal Kingdom: Hybrid Beasts & Modern Tales in Contemporary Jewellery. Spotlight artworks by Klimt02.
Author:
Cécile Maes, Klimt02
Edited by:
Klimt02
Edited at:
Barcelona
Edited on:
2025
Animal Kingdom: Hybrid Beasts & Modern Tales in Contemporary Jewellery. Spotlight artworks by Klimt02.

© By the author. Read Klimt02.net Copyright.

Intro
Born into the so‑called French Millennial generation, I grew up reading the stories of Jean de La Fontaine and watching movies by Studio Ghibli and Walt Disney. My childhood unfolded alongside anthropomorphised animals, both real and imagined, drawn from folk traditions and modern fiction. These companions shaped my understanding of the world, in its light and its shadows, touching on themes such as loss, betrayal, the concept of freedom, and identity.

This Spotlight Artworks presents five contemporary jewellery artists who draw on the animal kingdom, fantastical beings, and fragments of popular culture. Here, beasts are no longer merely beasts but emerge as poetic and critical protagonists reflecting the world around us.

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The first traumas of my peaceful childhood? The separation of Dumbo from his mother, chained in her circus wagon, or the tragic end of the young oysters (hello Benedikt) in Alice in Wonderland, illustrating the adage that curiosity can be a dangerous trait.

Much like fables, contemporary art also relies on narrative and storytelling to question society and humanity. This is precisely what this Spotlight Artwork by Klimt02 highlights, through five selected pieces that explore this enduring theme.



Miniature Bestiaries

The animal kingdom, now largely under humanity’s rule, increasingly resembles a zoo: a space where every species is on display, and from which the artist can draw freely. Talking about it, it is the zoo that maybe marked the starting point of Felieke van der Leest’s career, as Jorunn Veiteberg recounts. As a child, she grew up near the Emmen Zoo in the Netherlands, where a parade of exotic animals was around the corner.

Perhaps this memory led her to collect a set of plastic toy figurines representing all kinds of animals. Standardised products of the consumer society, these miniatures were initially intended to populate children’s play stories. Felieke gathered and preserved them, gradually building her own miniature zoo's library. From 2002, these figures have served as the raw material for her wearable sculptures and her recognisable artistic universe.

As in fables, humour operates on multiple levels: behind the amusing image of figurines dressed in pretty frocks or naïve costumes often lies subtle satire. These transformations, animals into humans, humans into animals, explore universal and contemporary themes such as war, love, ecology, species extinction, and religion.

In one of her pieces, Hallelujah Devil Singers, the artist depicts Tasmanian devils, an endangered marsupial native to the Australian island, known for their piercing, unsettling cries, the very opposite of the celestial sounds of a gospel choir. Yet through its title and the stories it evokes, the brooch invites further interpretation. This is Felieke’s strength: plastic animals combined with crochet become characters in stories with double meanings, oscillating between childlike innocence and keen observation of the adult world.
Felieke van der Leest. Brooch: Hallelujah Devil Singers, 2020. Textile, plastic animals, oxidized silver and cubic zirconia.


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On the other hand, Sari Liimatta’s universe transposes the fable (a story revealing a universal truth) into the realm of a distorted childhood. Her animal creatures, also made from plastic figurines, reflect a voracious consumerism that pierces, tears, and overloads them with unnecessary ornamentation before abandoning them.

Artificial hybrids and remnants of impulses both creative and destructive, Sari’s bestiary appears as modern chimeras: reassembled and exhausted, somewhere between sculpture, jewellery, and relic. Bearing the marks of a saturated society, her work tests innocence. Toys and animals become the victims, holding up a mirror to the consequences of our actions and a darker side of human nature.


Sari Liimatta. Pendant: The Veterans, 2024. Recycled aluminum, glass beads, metal buckle, metal pins, peridots, a plastic toy, velvet ribbon. From series: After World.


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The taxidermied animal also becomes the protagonist of multiple narratives. Preserved in its symbolic dimension, from trophy to captured/still life, Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker) combine it with other elements to create narrative devices. These allow the viewer to reconstruct a story addressing universal themes such as malleability, transience, and very often, death. Each piece conveys a narrative in which unease struggles with simple contemplation, confronting the spectator with their own relationship to mortality.

After all, death is not an abstract concept. "We, westerners, are usually very far removed from our own death and mortality. At the same time, we want to tame everything and bend it to our will. But we remain part of nature. I think that value of death – invisible death – is the reason why our work frightens many people." explains Afke Golsteijn. Quote from "Old to New - artwork by Idiots” by Doreen Timmers in Palet magazine, April 2019.

Yet, Idiots’ work is not meant to be dramatic. Sometimes ironic, it highlights the unconscious way we consume, particularly animals: their skin, their fat, or other parts which are in everyday products. Their work questions which role belongs to the animal or the human? Many of these dead animals are given a new life in an environment where human culture surrounds them, both literally and figuratively.

The piece Stereo White is constructed by means of two parakeets who died in captivity, to which the artists give yet another life. Through this hybridisation of nature and the technological world, the object visually illustrates how we repeat without thinking what we say, often turning a deaf ear to universal truths.
Idiots. Object: Stereo White, 2018. Taxidermy parakeet, vintage headphone. Photo by: Afke Golsteijn.


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Where Idiots explore hybridisation, Lisa Walker turns to the everyday. Like collecting shells on a beach, she selects her materials from consumer society. Who better than these objects can tell the story of contemporary humanity? Transformed into jewellery, they become contemporary talismans. They reinvent use, create distance, and invite us to contemplate these familiar fragments in a new space, on the body. Whereas the previous artists construct a narrative context, Lisa adopts a more radical approach.

In a brooch titled Untitled, like the majority of her pieces, presented during the Powderly exhibition, a wooden dog painted in screen green seems to embody the idea of an object made neutral, ready to disappear, to dissolve into the image. Sitting, immobile, this dog does not immediately read as jewellery, and yet it is. Its solitary presence brings us back to the original object and to our own perception: a figurine. A representation transformed into a body ornament by the brooch mechanism attached to its back. A way of disembodying the object and shifting the gaze: from material to form, from jewellery to idea.
Lisa Walker. Brooch: Untiltled, 2012. Wood, lacquer, steel.


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Beside the radical approach that reduces the object to its status as a human-made-and-perceived item, other artists turn to the animal kingdom to celebrate its beauty and complexity.

In his series The Ancient Travels, Jongseok Lim builds insects using the filigree technique. These giant creatures, at once familiar and strange, seem to emerge from an ancient, unknown, and even imagined world. We can still thank those animated films that once made us imagine a colourful world, filled with millions of wild animals, where we all lived together in perfect harmony (let’s hope that was true).

From these lush ecosystems, the artist gives rise to pieces that reflect the splendour of the animal world, lying somewhere between memory and imagination. Elevated, almost sacred, these insects close the loop of this journey and remind us that even in the most artificial artistic propositions, the genesis of all creation is rooted in nature.
Jongseok Lim. Brooch: The Golden Voyage, 2024. Fine silver, sterling silver, nickel silver, gold leaf, ottchil. From Series: The Ancient Travels. 


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About the author


Cécile Maes graduated from ENSA Limoges in design, specialising in Contemporary Jewellery. Her interest in jewellery grows from the human relationships games it involves. Social object, jewellery creates narratives and becomes a sign. Investigating classical typologies, her work is a re-interpretation where historical references and everyday exploration connect ideas to speak about jewellery, the reasons why we wear it and the meanings we give to it.

Mail: cilce.maes@gmail.com
Instagram: cilce_maes