Elisabeth Holder. From Jewellery to Contextual Art

The new monograph on Elisabeth Holder presents the first in-depth look at the work and evolution of this renowned German jewellery artist. Over the course of her conceptual engagement with the definition of jewellery, she has developed works that also incorporate the wider context beyond the human body.

Elisabeth Holder’s preoccupation with jewellery is rooted in her classical training as a goldsmith, but during her studies in Düsseldorf and London she soon expanded her skills as a jewellery artist. Her exploration of organic and geometric abstraction while studying under Sigrid Delius forms a thread that runs throughout Holder’s entire oeuvre.

Holder has explored various subject areas over the course of her artistic evolution. Among them are ancient symbols, investigations into handling materials within the dichotomous conflict between mastery and dialogue, and the fundamental question of what jewellery actually is and can be. She quickly began to understand jewellery as a medium of reflection and knowledge; she thus explored function in relation to the body, symbols to surface and space, and symbolic references to form and context.

As part of her research, she started to augment her jewellery outwards, which at first expanded the bodily realm and then migrated into architecture and nature, disengaging itself from the classical notion of jewellery and ultimately becoming conceptual art.

Jewellery as a choice, so the thinking goes, can be found in the simplest of things, in the geographical setting, in the physical tangible environment. Jewellery remains the object of Holder’s research and at the same time is embedded in a complex network of possible perspectives and ways of seeing: an unfettered strategy that is not yet complete but is continually acquiring new contours in processual and action-orientated doing.

The monograph From Jewellery to Contextual Art traces Elisabeth Holder’s artistic evolution in the form of a retrospective featuring numerous images and texts by the artist. An essay by Ellen Maurer Zilioli reflects on Holder’s oeuvre and her concept of jewellery as well as drawing references to her teaching post as Professor of Jewellery Art at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Holder’s conceptual understanding of jewellery is ultimately reflected in the monograph’s remarkable book design, which alternates between portrait and landscape format.