Sunday, 2 January 2011

Bend me FLUX me anyway you want me

After our amazing feedback sessions, a course friend and I took ourselves off the the Mac to see the Flux exhibition. Flux, for those of you that don't know, is an exhibition of contemporary jewellery designers and is part of the annual Brilliantly Birmingham Exhibition.
I really enjoyed it. I went with my next project, 'Design For Production', in mind, so I was paying close attention to the methods the designers were using for their work.
A few collections really caught my eye. My favourite there was Gina Boldwin's, which is drawn from the anatomy of blackbirds. She then manipulates this form to produce dramatic pieces. Combining casting techniques and taxidermy Gina creates ornamental home wear and wearables. I think the main reason I was attracted to this work was because I'd recently presented a seminar on Gender and Jewellery, in which I looked into androgynous jewellery. One of the designers I looked into for this was Reid Peppard, who, like Gina Boldwin, uses the art of taxidermy. Being a vegetarian and animal lover, I expected to be horrified by this kind of work. But I wasn't at all. In fact, I was intrigued. I think a large part of why I didn't mind Peppard's work is because she never directly killed any of the animals she used, I can only hope that the same is true for Gina Boldwin.
Here are some pictures of Gina's work that I saw at flux (ignore the gabbering writing, I scanned in my journal entry):

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