NOW & THEN
Antique meets Contemporary

‘Slugs’ - brooches in chased silver and steel

David Bielander

Snail, Mouth, Pig, Raspberry. My pieces present the unmistakablely namable.I realize my work in the formal language of traditional western jewellery. Within the parameters of this harmless, unsuspicious system I make my interference: through the selection of materials and the use of techniques; from cheap production jewellery, from classic goldsmiths handwork and from hobby jewellery, I connect the wellknown with the all-to-well-known, forcing these often contrary contexts of “Applied Art” in ambivilent positions. In the selection of my stylistic material I avoid very conciously closesness to contemporary design or to “Fine Art”.

My pieces are distortion games, confusions of identitiy and affiliation.
I like to use pictures, materials and techniques that stand as classic examples that serve as klischees, that are synonymes of a Genre, time or attitude, with their collective assosiations and evocations.
I shift and displace/dislocate these pictures, materials and techniques and bring them together in ambivalent positions.

Where does one belong when one wears such a piece? Where does the jewellery belong? How do I as the maker fit in with this?
A MoirÈ-Effect. This shimmer, that you can’t sort out and arrange, is what I want.
Wearers of jewellery move in the open, they are the exhibitions, they replace the wall, in the best case, they are a part of the work, they expose themselves to opinion, as cultivated, intellectual, complex contemporary conceptuel beings, they bring the embarassing, the petit bourgeois, the kitsch, trivial, primitive, shallow and silly within grasp in the full sense of the word. And vice versa. Causing havoc.

I am very serious about Leichtigkeit, about lightness .. and jewellery, with simultaneous intimacy and openess is a wonderful medium for this.

My pieces are the materialisation of observations that come from a spontanious unfiltered naivity with the wish to share and circulate these visions with the wearers of my work and the public.

The incentive to make work lies in the pleasure of the experience of how tiny or spontaneous interventions or little objects, or not so little ones, interacting with the character and physionomy of the wearer can create astonishing reactions, make signals, build these pictures, create wonder, or simply make someone smile.

Biographical Details