The first globetrotters in jewellery

Jewellery makers are globetrotters, restless nomads who may settle everywhere where they can find fellow craftsmen and women. The world is big, but the world of jewellery is small – its size related to the size of the contemporary author jewel itself.

However, this goes for the situation anno 2006. In 1993, the year of the first Jewelry Quake, the situation was quite different. Internet was still in the future, we had never heard of price breakers in the aviation branch, and who had a mobile phone in these days? Distances were larger, and information was more limited. In that period three chosen Rietveld Academy students (Ela Bauer, Manon van Kouswijk and Karin Seufert) and three students of the Akademie der Bildende Künste in München (Volker Atrops, Karl Fritsch and Norman Weber) travelled to Japan to cooperate with three students of Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry in Tokyo (Teruo Akatsu, Yoshihiko Imai and Sinichiro Kobayashi). They were supervised by three teachers, Prof. Otto Künzli, Prof. Kazuhiro Itoh, and Prof. Joke Brakman.

The students not only made a joint exhibition which travelled to Munich and Amsterdam after running in Tokyo, but they also discussed each others work and contemporary jewellery, and they made a conceptual beach jewel, called “Jewelry Tide”.

During their Japanese stay the students delved into their motives and ideas, and although the earth didn’t quake, they did make discoveries that turned their ideas about jewellery upside down. They might have been the first generation of jewellery makers who were confronted with ‘globalisation’ in jewellery, who discovered that there is a kind of a world-wide phenomenon called contemporary jewellery, no matter cultural and individual differences – no matter the discovery of a typical ‘Rietveldian’, Japanese or Munich approach. And the audience in all three countries was witness to this.

Now Ela Bauer and Karin Seufert decided to make a sequel to this project. Surprisingly only one of the former Japanese students, Teruo Akatsu, is still working independently as a jewellery maker like his European colleagues. However these seven artists show how their striving to find an individual language at that time, is a promise that has been fulfilled. The question whether the work is made in Amsterdam, Munich or Tokyo seems rather irrelevant today. The world of jewellery has become a global village.

Liesbeth den Besten, 6 April 2006

Amsterdam * Tokyo * Munich * Stockholm * Bern