Curating
Continuing on with my mission to dismantle the boundaries between art and jewellery and following on from my book Coveted and the Sotheby’s Brilliant and Black exhibition, I invited 17 renowned contemporary artists to express their connection to nature through wearable sculpture in a selling exhibition curated by me at The Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery in London. It launched on the evening of 18th November 2021 at a private recption with our friends from The Serpentine Galleries and during the evening I staged a talk with Diane Venet, one of the foremost collectors of artist jewellery in the world.
The idea for the show came from chapter 4 of Coveted which focuses on the subject of Naturalism. As Covid rages on, our evolving relationship with natural world and the peace it gives us inspired me to ask 17 artists to submit 40 jewels embracing both their figurative and abstract approaches. This was the first time many of the artists have offered their art via a gallery including me as I made my first jewel called ‘Self’, a cuff in bronze, dark grey oxidised silver and white sapphires in an edition of 8 with the EC workshop in Rome (see the Curation info page) It was a dream come true in many ways.
All the artists found innovative and diverse ways to illustrate the human journey, politically in the form of Ai Weiwei’s Ring W addressing his concerns on migration, through abstraction via Grima’s casting of a lusciously carved lychee skin and via the built environment as referenced by the faceted sculpture of Melanie Eddy. The show was announced on Town & Country with coverage in Forbes, Italian Vogue, The Robb Report, JCK, Kommersant Style, Cent, VO and Gioiellis magazines. The artists featured were: Ai Weiwei, Bibi van der Velden, Fabio Salini, Frank Stella, Giorgio Vigna, Giuseppe Penone, Grima, Jacqueline Rabun, James de Givenchy, John Moore, Joy BC, Liv Luttrell, Lydia Courteille, Melanie Eddy, Melanie Grant, Satta Matturi, Ute Decker and Wallace Chan. The exhibition was sponsored by Chêne Bleu.
Images: Courtesy of the artists
Original page: http://www.elisabettacipriani.com/force-of-nature/
The By appointment exhibition ran in-person 18-27th November 2021 and online until January 2022.