Jewellery and Corpus: Ädellab

For the past three years, the graduating students of the Bachelor’s programme in Jewellery and Corpus: Ädellab have been invested in each other’s respective artistic practices and explorations. They have been practicing deep listening, have been relentlessly inquisitive and critical and in turn supported each other in being alert and engaged, listening not only to the needs posed by their individual degree projects and works, but also to their surroundings and to the different perspectives that they have encountered. Together by exploring making, materiality and various artistic methods, they have developed a practice of mutual curiosity. The latter is perhaps the most essential; it becomes their superpower as they prepare to leave school and head out to face the possibilities and challenges that the world holds, having each other as colleagues.

Themes and questions explored by the students in their degree projects include: body modification and embodiment; memory and belonging; experiences of comfort, fear, spirituality, and loss; the shower floor drain as a metaphor for the often unsuccessful ways we tend to ‘filter life’; perceived material and craft values – and the possibility of challenging them – in the contexts of a long-standing making tradition such as corpus/silversmithing, and of contemporary jewellery; ethical questions around what should happen to our bodies after death, and whether other burial rituals, more attuned to the cycle of nature, may be possible.

These degree projects invite the viewers into a shared space of reflection, where the boundaries between body, object, and room gently dissolve, and where the smallest, most intricate details have a lot to say, or rather, whisper.

Beatrice Brovia
Senior Lecturer in Craft, specialising in Jewellery