Ädellab/Metal Design

Jewellery embodies a history that relates to personal narratives and physical experience. Contemporary formulations of the art of jewellery, to which students at the department of metal and jewellery art have made no small contribution, encompass the body as a narrative arena in which jewellery can in different ways open up perspectives that may not always be linked to adornment. This also helps to change perceptions of the bodies that bear them. The possibility of being able to make a statement with one individual body, to be one’s own gallery, contrasts starkly with the generalising narratives about the body and our identities the contemporary world often offers us.

This contemporary world also comprises the quotidian, which consists to a large extent of managing various objects. We refer to this management as consumption and the objects involved as consumer products. The discussion of the concept of corpus taking place in the department of metal and jewellery art which is exemplified so well in some of this year’s degree projects, can raise other, alternative perspectives on this consumption: perspectives that provide deepened understanding of what happens to us in our encounters with objects and what these may comprise.

In their degree projects our students contest in different ways our habitual conceptions of what jewellery, or consumer products, are and offer us their own totally personal narratives about these phenomena. These narratives provide a somewhat new and well-needed understanding in two forms of art, jewellery and metal design. This is a time when individual bodies have become public property and the tactile, poetic values of consumer objects disregarded in the spirit of consumerism. In this context, these art forms become increasingly important.

The best of luck to our courageous students who deserve every success in their internal and external ambulations.

Anders Ljungberg, Senior Lecturer, Ädellab/Metal Design