Eva Van Kempen
Jeweller
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MunichJewelleryWeek2020
Published: 11.11.2020
evavankempen.com
Eva van Kempen (Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1976) is an Amsterdam based jewellery designer. She studied at the vocational school of Goldsmiths in Schoonhoven and Amsterdam. Her work evolved drastically when she was confronted with illness. In 2015 Eva van Kempen presented her jewellery line LifeLines made from safe medical waste. She did so in a solo-exhibition in the Amsterdam Medical Centre, the hospital where she used to be a patient. At the invitation of Museum de Fundatie Eva van Kempen designed jewellery for busts and portraits of sculptors whose work the museum aquired down the years. With the exhibition Ready-To-Bear the artist has managed to "inject" some sparkle underpinned by a sense of wryness into the often paradoxical themes of illness, fertility, life and death. Currently Eva is participating in "Challenging Jewellery", a temporary Master Programme at Sandberg Instituut, initiated by Ted Noten, Gijs Bakker, Ruudt Peters and Liesbeth den Besten, coordinator Sarah Mesritz, head tutors BLESS. The programme aims to look at the most pressing issues of our time, in order to allow "healing".
Statement
The inspiration for the series "LifeLines" (2015), "Scents of Life" (2017), "Ready-To-Bear" (2017), “Planned Parenthood" (2018-2020) and "Freedom as Luxury” (2020) finds its origin in medical materials and medicine. I am fascinated by what manmade medical materials and medicine can mean for a human life and for humanity as a whole. Designed for the human body, I feel that these materials have the perfect scale to become jewels. Driven by an urge to reanimate safe hospital waste - expired intravenous systems, syringes and medicine - I aim to honour and restore these materials to what they could have meant. The works invite the viewer to look with new eyes and rethink prevailing notions on medical materials, societal or even humanitarian issues.CV 
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