Jewellery and Corpus: Ädellab

What is a subject without its roots?
What is a practice without curious tentacles, reaching out towards other areas of knowledge and experience?

At Jewellery and Corpus: Ädellab, the students explore ways of tending to the specificities of jewellery and corpus, by deep diving into the processes, materials, histories, traditions and contexts that are particular to the subjects. This is necessary in order to gain a perspective that is established/rooted and historical, in order to have a departure point from where to speak. At the same time, throughout their education, the students have considered what jewellery and corpus can offer to other disciplines and practices, and vice versa, to open new spaces for understanding, knowing and sharing. Hence, methods are borrowed across disciplinary boundaries, and processes are allowed to be influenced and cross-pollinated.

It is in this space between digging deeper in the intricacies of the specific subjects, while at the same time envisioning modes to expand them, that we encounter the practices of our graduating students. They propose a wealth of possibilities for jewellery and corpus to become embedded in the complexity of the present, and to tell us a bit more about current hopes, desires, behaviours, worldviews and fears.

There is humour, playfulness, room offered for introspection as well as for resonance, a wish to re-enchant long-standing craft practices, the urge to reconnect with the materials that built up our surroundings, the magic spell of minerals, metals, and other agents, reacting with one another and with the human body in almost alchemical processes. There are also visions of the future of adornment and what these say about our bodies’ boundaries today. Ultimately, there are persistent acts of care that help us to redefine our relationship to waste, resources, symbols, and the spaces in which we meet and work.

Beatrice Brovia
Senior Lecturer in Craft, specialising in jewellery