e.g.etal News

Journal: Sean O'Connell

One of the richest qualities of jewellery is its intimate potency. When it is strongest, a treasured piece of jewellery is a small blinding spark of personal significance, a night star by which to navigate, a marker that tells us from where we have come and to where we are going. There are only two things in my life that are like that (besides people)—music and picture books—and because music is impossible to talk about, I am also going to share some of my most potent and intimate picture books in this post….

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Tagged: Journal, Sean O Connell

Journal: Sean O'Connell

Plants and mushrooms are very inspiring. In the ground they are perfect little creations, balanced shapes and patterns that are in perfect harmony with their environment. They are the biggest inspiration for my jewellery, their basic forms like a template for beauty, their structure like a map of forces that flow though them as they grow and live. And on the plate they are divine, subtly cooked in combinations to happily fill the belly.

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Tagged: Journal, Sean O Connell

e.g.etal at the National Gallery of Australia

Since September 2010, e.g.etal has curated a collection of jewellery at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. This cross section of our represented artists brings a range of the best contemporary jewellery to the nation’s capital.

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Tagged: Other News

Journal: Sean O'Connell

Oma, my grandmother, is an intense old German lady. She cooks a mean kartoffelpuffer (potato pancake), likes to save money by re-using postage stamps, voted for Pauline Hansen (she thinks that immigrants should go back home, somehow forgetting she was also one), thought Adolf Hitler was right (about who knows what), and taught me to whistle real loud with my fingers (she was a tomboy!). Incidentally, my grandfather taught me how to make fart noises under my armpit in the shower—a real classy couple, my grandparents.

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Tagged: Journal, Sean O Connell

Journal: Sean O'Connell

“And it is not just physical torture—spending days alone at the bench drinking too much coffee and talking to your hammer because there is no one else, the myopia of extended concentration upon one small spot in space gradually taking its toll, the smallest things becoming all encompassing, the devil in the detail cackling as you chase ever finer scratches in the pursuit of a perfect mirror polish…. It is like a drug: sometimes you just get all tangled up and have a bad trip, becoming deeply unsettled…”

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Tagged: Journal, Sean O Connell

Debbie Sheezel on colour, Derwent pencils and the legacy of enamel...

When I started enamelling, I had no idea it was going to be a career. I started because it was a passion and I just wanted to do it. I didn’t do it setting out to achieve anything in particular but then people started coming to me asking to buy things I’d made and also asking to learn how to work with enamel. One Moomba parade I was asked to decorate part of a float, which was the first commission I ever had. Word gets around, I suppose…

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Tagged: Interviews, Debbie Sheezel

Journal: Anna Davern

…I am more intrigued by the idea of “the life of the object”. Kevin Murray describes jewellery as “attaching itself to people and disengaging itself from people”. The jewellery object has a trajectory and a journey to travel in its life. In this way, jewellers can be seen as tutors of objects. We prepare the jewellery objects for the journeys they must travel.

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Tagged: Journal, Anna Davern

Journal: Anna Davern

“The impenetrability and heaviness of stone is thus at striking odds with the imagery West conjures out of their surface and substance. There is an essential play here between solidity and lightness, surface and depth, which ultimately poses an unanswerable question: how can stones float, or flowers become as lasting as geological time?” (Julie Ewington on Margaret West)

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Tagged: Journal, Anna Davern

Northcity4 open the door...

NC4 is a new Melbourne-based initiative driven by the remarkable individual practices of its founders as well as a mandate to share their collective knowledge, skills and techniques through a program of mentorships, seminars, access studios and workshops, for those with and without previous training (so there is hope for us all)…

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Tagged: Other News, Katherine Bowman, Anna Davern, Ali Limb, Natalia Milosz Pierkarska

Journal: Anna Davern

In Anna Davern’s second Journal entry she examines the influence that British jeweller Caroline Broadhead has had on her work since studying at Sydney College of the Arts. Says Anna, “I was blown away by the way these works complemented and extended the body. And I realised that jewellery can be about the whole body and not just the finger, the ear, or (heaven forbid) the lapel!”

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Tagged: Journal, Anna Davern