Sigurd Bronger: Laboratorium Mechanum

Jewellery between engineering art and brainteaser: Sigurd Bronger’s Laboratorium Mechanum 

Propeller, safety pin, balloon, wind-up key, and measuring device: these five unusual objects rewrite the world of the Norwegian ‘jewellery engineer’ Sigurd Bronger. His fascination for machines and instruments carries over into humorously produced jewellery pieces, and transforms natural materials and everyday items into meticulously executed and refined designs. In his ‘Laboratorium Mechanum’ amusing ‘wearable devices’ evolve, which serve to help the artist find new forms of expression at the interface of jewellery, art, design, and engineering: brooches, pendants and rings with balloons, sponges, eggs, medical instruments or even his own mother’s gallstones. 

Early on Sigurd Bronger broke away from the conservative notion of traditional goldsmithing and experimented with form and materials. Jewellery is, for him, a means of communication in which new concepts relating to body, beauty, and decoration are able to be presented and put to the test. The unconventional pieces are seen more as free works rather than pieces of jewellery. Thanks partly to the absurd use of everyday objects he stands in the tradition of ready-made as much as he does in that of Surrealism. Pop art and Conceptual art have also left their traces in Bronger’s jewellery work. And through his use of red and yellow he is frequently associated with the Dutch group De Stijl. 

The questions that Sigurd Bronger casts in his work refer to function and utility, decoration and beauty, or design and art. Does the beautiful really have to be useless, and the practical aesthetically uninteresting? Do the pat-terns that have been developed for a particular use not also have their own artistic allure? In a playfully humorous way Bronger’s ‘answers’ communicate, reflect, question, and examine the concept that is ‘jewellery’.

With contributions by
Jorunn Veiteberg: Professor at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Bergen
Cecilie Skeide: Curator at the Lillehammer Art Museum, Lillehammer
Paul Derrez: Director of Galerie Ra, Amsterdam
André Gali: Chief Editor of KUNSTforum, Oslo