ENCHANTMEN
This series of jewellery that was made in 2016 and it’s a project that takes its inspiration from the formal language and in the action deconstruction. Enchantmen is a sister project to my series Broken white lines.
ENCHANTMEN
To deconstruct something is to take apart or examine an object in order to reveal the basis or composition often with the intention of exposing biases, flaws, or inconsistencies.
The starting point of this project was a baroque ornamented wood chair from the 1910. I have chosen this object since I have conflicted feelings relating to this object. I have a affection to the object itself but I would never keep or use the piece of furniture in my home. On one hand it represents an old aesthetic with its vulgar baroque shapes, highly ornate and with extravagant style. On the other hand, I was drawn to the baroque style that used contrast, movement, intense detail to achieve a sense of wonder.
I spent a lot of time reflecting upon the chair and its forms, analysing the round curvy ornaments. But the longer I looked at the ornamentation the hollower and bleaker did the ornaments appear. They felt like a frozen representation of the past, hard to reference due to its strong aesthetic and its history.
My gaze was refocused on the lines connecting the ornaments, they appeared as calm and clear in comparison to the intense ornaments.
By reducing the chair to its constituent parts gave me the possibility to reinterpret it, by adapting or separating the elements of gave me the freedom to radically and in a new way reconstruct pieces of jewellery.
By carefully taking apart the chair bit by bit with a Japanese hand saw gave me an understanding of the chairs basic structure and design, it unveiled its underlying structure and design. I later used this knowledge to to rebuild the jewellery pieces, I reused fastening techniques and joining methods.
A pyramid shaped obsidian stone was added to the jewellery piece to give the jewellery a duality of materiality. A counterpart to the white soft wood is this machine cut cold stone that carries with it a feeling of precision and order.