Konrad Mehus. Form Follows Fiction. Jewellery and Objects

‘Jewellery can be made out of anything!’ 

Since the end of the 1960s, Konrad Mehus has been regarded as one of the leading protagonists of Norwegian art jewellery. Creative intention and con-tent far outrank practical use and function. He breaks with established notions of jewellery as decoration, preferring to extend it as a means of communication. 

The silver rings for storing contraceptive pills (!) conceived in 1967 had already made clear his early quest towards a new relationship between gold-smithing and society. Soon he was challenging the functionality and materi-ality of jewellery and implements: for example, in the mid-1970s, in the form of whimsical objects made of ‘useless’ bits of assembled cutlery, or at the end of the 1980s, with medicine boxes cast out of bronze. They bear his name, thus inviting the observer simultaneously to draw (presumably false) conclusions about him as a person. Found objects or base materials, such as wood, also find their way into his jewellery objects: for example a Swedish five Öre coin in the series Poor Man’s Silver (c. 1991–93) or a box commonly used by the post office in his Postmodern Clock (2011). 

The miniature portraits of typical interior furnishings of the 1950s, which he has been creating since 1995, make Mehus’s richly symbolic and metaphoric language vividly tangible: for him, recycled memories – he ultimately lived for a long time with his mother in a tiny apartment comprising two rooms and a kitchen – evoke very individual associations in the observer. Yet, in the most general sense, they also stand for the redevelopment and improvement of universal living conditions – a central concern in Norwegian welfare politics. 

Konrad Mehus thus combines art, the everyday and life – associations, which are intensified by wearing the jewellery, as the narrated ‘histories’ are brought into manifold social contexts and activated therein. Jewellery as a narrative medium – full of wit and with social relevance.