Designers On Jewellery: 12 Years Of Jewellery Production By Chi ha Paura...? by Liesbeth den Besten (National Design Centre Melbourne; Arnoldsche Art, 2008), p. 15.
30
31
See p. 84.
London-based Marc Newson (b. 1963) was born in Sydney. He has designed a wide range of products and spaces, and one of his most famous design is the Lockheed Lounge chair of 1986. 32
“Design is so cross-disciplinary that it would be odd if people weren’t experimenting with necklaces and rings, just as they do with houses, websites and clothing.”
German designer and artist Rolf Sachs (b. 1955), born in Lausanne, Switzerland, but is based in London. Disegno visited his studio for a salon event in May 2012 (see Disegnodaily.com).
33
34
Gijs Bakker in ibid., p. 15.
Ingo Maurer (b. 1932) has showrooms in Munich and New York, and his lighting designs have often focused on the use of LEDs, such as his El.E.Dee table lamp of 2001.
35
36 Chamber of Wonder ran from 7 December 2012 to 27 January 2013.
Benjamin Lignel (b. 1972), based in London and Paris, studied furniture design at the Royal College of Art before turning to jewellery – hence his initial approach to jewellery focused on function and context.
37
British designer Simone Brewster (b. 1983) is based in London. Her jewellery designs feature strong shapes that echo Bauhaus and Art Deco forms.
38
39 Simone Brewster quoted in the Aram Gallery exhibition catalogue for Beautiful Objects, unpaginated. 40 Saskia Diez (b. 1976) is based in Munich. As well as jewellery design she is also known for her Papier bag series, for which she was awarded the German Design Prize 2010.
108 Disegno. Design and jewellery
> The persistence of such thinking has spurred the most significant attempt to bring design and jewellery together. In 1996, Bakker set up Chi ha Paura…?, an Amsterdam-based foundation exploring the lack of relationship between the two – the name translates as “Who is Afraid of...?”, and is premised on design’s “fear” of contemporary jewellery.30 Since its establishment, Chi ha Paura…? has put Bakker and Van Leersum’s 1960s pieces into production, alongside new works from designers including Arad, Konstantin Grcic31, Marc Newson32, and Rolf Sachs33. Bakker has a clear idea of what he wants for the project. “We look for interesting concepts, unusual choices of materials or functional aspects that are cast in a different light. Designs like this have to have a story, some kind of political or cultural significance or a dash of humour. They also have to have the kind of content that can stand up to multiplication,” he writes.34 Achieving this has not always been easy. “When I started, I really had to work to teach [designers] that it is possible for jewellery to be design,” says Bakker. “Just like any object in our house and our environment. It can have the same approach, the same philosophy.” The biggest challenge for designers creating jewellery seems to be a question of scale. Bakker recalls inviting German lighting designer Ingo Maurer to design a piece for the collection.35 “Maurer told me, ‘What you guys do on a square centimetre is impossible for me’,” says Bakker. Ronan Bouroullec also raises this issue. “Jewellery requires a certain delicacy that is not often in the designer’s vocabulary. It is not a question of millimetres, but a tenth of a millimetre.” For Bakker, it is precisely this challenge that keeps drawing him to jewellery. “Giving content on such a small scale is what makes it so deeply challenging and interesting – the issue of scale and the direct contact with body, the fit.”
Initiatives such as Chi ha Paura…? suggest design’s receptiveness to jewellery as a concept. This makes sense, given the society we now inhabit – we are no longer in Bayley’s industrial condition but a post-industrial one, in which the divisions between the handmade and the mass-produced, and between art, design and craft, are increasingly redundant. “Design in general is so cross-disciplinary and permissive now,” says Glenn Adamson, “that it would be odd if people weren’t experimenting with necklaces and rings, just as they do with houses, websites and clothing.” As Adamson noted at the Design Museum panel discussion, this has also been true at other points in history; in the pre-industrial era, jewellery and design were simply part of a larger culture of object making, one that operated across all scales of production.
Cohn embodies this “anything goes” spirit. She variously makes her own jewellery, employs others to do so in her Melbourne workshop, and has pieces produced far from her own hands, such as the production of her Cohncave fruit bowl, designed in 1992 for Alessi Stofer similarly typifies this desire to overcome disciplinary boundaries. He makes extensive use of readymades to create pieces that demonstrate an irreverent attitude towards ideas of skill and quality of manufacture, two of the main ways in which jewellery has been traditionally evaluated. Yet the relevance of such values is being held up for scrutiny by a number of practitioners today. Christopher Thompson Royds of London’s Gallery S O affirms this idea. He recently curated Chamber of Wonder36, an exhibition of practitioners, including Stofer, conceived to coincide with the Design Museum show. “Concepts such as the presence of the maker’s hand, a central theme within craft, is not of primary concern, and in some cases is barely evident,” he says. He cites Benjamin Lignel37, included in both the Design Museum and