SELECTED WORDS

Interview with Melissa Cameron
for Klimt02

TRANSITIONS

“Three years ago, Australian born art jeweller Melissa Cameron packed up her workshop in Melbourne, moved to America and settled down in a house on one of the many lush hills of Seattle. Some years prior to that, Melissa had done another major move as she transitioned from a career in interior architecture to becoming an independent art jeweller.

 We were able to get together in her workshop to talk about how these changes has affected her as an artist and to find out more about the jewels she creates from laser cut metal and recycled objects.

– It gets designed upstairs, made downstairs and the photographed back upstairs, Melissa explains as she leads the way down the steep stairs to her home studio.
– I set up the habit of having the computer in one room and the studio in the other a long time ago. When you are at the bench you need to be at the bench. It is easy to get distracted. Normally I spend two hours by the computer in the morning, then I come down here. I try and fit in at least four hours a day by the bench Monday to Friday. Then sometimes I get really excited about a piece and I just want to come down and do it again on Saturday! I am conscious about that I am in a very gifted position at the moment, that I don’t have to produce something that I don’t enjoy or buy myself time at the studio and I think that makes me very aware of what I am doing and how I am doing it.  I do have a qualification that everything I make has to have a jewellery outcome. I put that pressure on myself as an artist and business person. It is hard to have an output that sustains you if you don’t finish things. I guess that is my designer background showing through.”
Read the full interview in Klimt02 Forum

In conversation with Marianne Schliwinski – Beyond the Wall of Books
Interview for Klimt02

Marianne Schliwinski
Photograph: Fixierte Bewegung – fixed movement, 1982
Photo by: Jürgen Eickhoff

Wearability, also of a piece of jewellery, cannot be considered as something that does not change. Wearability can be learned and hence is also variable with regard to its dimension and function. Time and time again, new definitions of what is considered wearable and what is acceptable may arise. Questioning traditional definitions of functionality can be an intrinsic quality of jewellery.

An early morning during Schmuck Week 2015 I had the pleasure of talking to German jewellery artist Marianne Schliwinski at gallery Spektrum. Over an espresso at we flipped through the latest publication of Spektrum – Marianne Schliwinski: beyond the wall of books – a close to 400 pages thick compilation, depicting Schliwinski’s fifty years of working with jewellery.
– This book took us one year to make. Jürgen Eickhoff and I started with an idea to make a smaller book but I have made so much work over the years. This book doesn’t even show everything and there were a lot of pieces I couldn’t include. Our intention was to get all of the material together and show it as a line. I have been working in different ways but still, there is a line. Some people who only saw one catalogue and then see other pieces during exhibitions say “I don’t understand you – you are always making new things!” Often they are not open enough to try to get into it, see what it was and understand why I am working in this way now. So that was why I thought I have to get it all together in a book. It is also a good experiment to go deeper in your own work. Fifty years of working, that is a long time.

Read the full article in Klimt02 Forum

ESSAY for Konstnären Nr.02/2013
about artist’s working conditions

Read online here (in Swedish)

ARTICLE for Baltic Jewellery News
The Nobel Jewellery Prize 2014

Essay on the theme ZOOM for Graduation catalogue 2013
HDK – Högskolan för Design och Konsthantverk, jewellery department

Catalogue design: Students of HDK /Anna-Lotta Ahlmén, Lena Gollvik, Magnus Andersson
Graphic design:  Students of HDK /Annie Hallén, Mikael Oskarsson, Viktoria Jakobsson
Print: Responstryck, Borås 2013

Information folder text for School of Design and Craft 2013
HDK – Högskolan för Design och Konsthantverk, jewellery department