Wanted Jewellery

THe definition of the jewel

Jiska Hartog and Michiel Henneman were two times successively winners of the New traditional jewellery award 2007 and 2008. Both trained as silversmith, studied art at the AKI academy in Enschede and gained their master in fine art at Wimbledon college of art in London. Hartog and Henneman started their practice in march 2007. In our work stands the definition concerning the jewel centrally, and this is thus immediately the most important source of inspiration. If for example accidentally a piece of chewing-gum falls from your mouth and this sticks on your clothing, can you consider this then as a jewel? To consider these as a jewel seems a step too far, and that is exactly where our interest is in located: to bring up the discussion of the values of material’s and the operations which we associate with this. The culture around the jewel is just as important as the jewel himself, we do not want to disconnect those two. That is one of the characteristics of the “wanted series”, the desire which can arouse by jewels at a human being is something we like to use as a illustration within our work. We work mainly with plastic, rubber and silver. Particularly the first two addressed us by their reference that it could be massively produced and massively distributed. The interaction between production and consumption is also something that we illustrate within the work. The fact that the jewels are recognizable as if are non-authentiek and as mass product, influenced the perception of the conceptual questions which we present by means of our jewels. Hartog and Henneman will present their work at Sieraad 2008, an international jewellery art fair at the Westergasfabriek Amsterdam from November 6-9.