Viktoria Münzker: Into the Unknown. Jewellery

Into the Unknown
Deep art research 1900-2012 an excursion 

„What have I put in my works to suggest so many subtleties? I have put in them a little door opening onto a mystery. I have made fictions. It is up to [the viewer] to go further. “
(Odilon Redon) 

„Glory to God in the highest“– telegraphed Queen Victoria on 14th of august 1858 the first time with the American president. The cheer about the success lasted only a few weeks. Then the connection interrupted and the 3745 km long transatlantic cable sank into the deep. After two years, as a part of repair works on the European segment, it came to another kind of sensation. The cable, which had to be lift from 1800 meters water depth, was populated by a coral species never seen before. Natural scientists were almost speechless. How could it be? Was the life in this depth not impossible after preliminary scientific findings? One country after another prepared itself for deep-sea expeditions….. 

….. Viktoria Münzker has not drained water from the encountered deep-sea fauna, nor degraded it to an ornamental stencil. Her jewellery objects are materialized imaginations. It's not how the things really are. How they could be – that is the point of her aesthetical capability. "They are not real shells, skeletons or corals. They are three-dimensional pictures of them", so Viktoria Münzker. She creates forms which report about themselves, are autonomous against the conventions of imitation. And they appear strange for the first blink, till we realize a reflection of our own psyche in it. Viktoria Münzker's creations origin in deeper layers of human consciousness, like Redon's shimmering-ascending sea-animals or the gloomy-glowing being in the sea-bed of Kubin's "Deep-sea". Feelings, wishes, fears and instincts drift on the bottom of the soul. Ascending. Descending. "The power of my feelings makes my work deeper and richer", says Viktoria Münzker. She could also become an archaeologist, she meant once. But also as a deep-sea exploring jewellery artist she brings for us to light what was lying hidden in the dark. 

Susanne Längle 

Texts and photos by Viktoria Münzker.
Introducing text by Susanne Längle.