Gioielli in Fermento 2015: The long road to unconventionality

I am honoured and very grateful to be able to give, even for this fifth edition of Gioielli in Fermento (Jewels in Ferment), my contribution to the project with a script that tries to investigate the thin line that demarcates and joins – such as a border/connection- the various meanings of a "unconventional jewel" in a (allegedly considered) precarious balance between spirit and substance, up to explore the idea of ​​spiritual nourishment as  it’s displayed here, in a “harvest” of precious objects.
Thus, for the fifth edition, the challenge proposed by the curator and the organizers of GiF (Jewels in Ferment) aims to bring into play the concepts of great creative vitality as a kick-star to an artistic production that explores some of the aspects of contemporary ornament, able to arouse emotions through the use of new techniques or renewed materials among the most diverse and not commonly considered valuable. A new grammar for a new language of unconventionality. A contemporary tekné, as a result.

Bread and wine are ancient foods, as old as the world, that the developement of man has transformed, recreated, idealized and sublimated arising them as a spiritual nourishment. A leap forward for these foods, made of real substance and born from the hand of the man who, with the stratification of thought and religion, rise in a precious concept, different and for the highest convivium.
On its side, contemporary jewellery – as all arts- is both daughter of present time and even of the universal (1), expresses its quality not only using humble materials and rather unusual, but also stripping completely the concept of "preciousness" commonly known.
For many people, this is a "depreciation" and, consequently, a shortage of the conventional value.
So, I find that in this ideal rendez-vous (quite a chiasmus) resides the will of Jewels in Ferment, that is to fathom that boundary/connection between the trivial things that become valuable and vice versa: beautiful images, full of new meanings that are renewed through that artistic energy nourishes creators themselves.

The selection presented for Gioielli in Fermento (Jewels in Ferment) 2015 shows that, even for contemporary jewellery and ornament, the choice of unconventionality is a long way ahead.  By the artists’ choices, along search paths and through all the materials used - as Joyce wrote, -  there’s an attempt to “try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand - that is art” without forgetting quality and the coherence of being an artist.

(1) Henri Focillon, La vita delle forme seguito da  Elogio della mano, Einaudi, Torino, 2002.
 

About the author

Nichka Marobin is a Dutch and Flemish art historian: she graduated at the University of Padova (Italy) with a thesis on German and Flemish Renaissance ornament prints. In 2011 she founded The Morning Bark, a blo(g)azette  on arts and humanities and  she is a passionate collector of contemporary jewellery.