Made / Worn: Australian Contemporary Jewellery

From intimate pieces to large scale works, the contemporary jewellery in Made / Worn: Australian Contemporary Jewellery explores the act of making and how jewellery is worn on the body, telling stories that start with the artist and continue through the life of the object worn or experienced, creating new resonances with owners into the future.

Spanning a wide range of materials, techniques and meanings, the works on display are playful, intricate, conceptual, personal and political. The artists also engage with themes of place, sustainability in materials and identity.

In her essay for the project ‘Everything and nothing – jewellery beyond adornment’ Melinda Young writes,

Contemporary jewellery practice sits at the crossroads of craft, design, and art, it positions ‘the human body as a general working area’.

Contemporary jewellery not only sees the making of recognisable forms of adornment using ‘known’ materials, it also has an ‘open attitude to methods and material’, questioning and pushing against ideas of what traditional jewellery can (or could) be.

The materiality and value of jewellery is questioned; sites of adornment and the process of making interrogated. The scale and scope of adornment comes into play as does a (re)consideration of what we consider the jewel or precious object to be.

The jewellery and objects in this collection have been created to accompany the more conceptual work by the following artists participating in Made / Worn: