|
 Anyone
acquainted with the work of Kevin Coates, Britain’s leading goldsmith,
knows that every piece he creates is an astonishingly complex work of
art, inspired by myriad influences including painting, theater, literature,
architecture, mathematics, the natural world, and his great passion—music.
The images he conjures—birds and beasts, mythic creatures, spirits
and archetypes—are imbued with an almost mystical quality and
appeal to the viewer at a primal level; they fundamentally describe
the pathos—and magic—of the human experience, and the soul’s
journey through time and space.
In Coates’s latest series, A Notebook of Pins, shown first at
the Wallace Collection in London, England, and recently at the Mobilia
Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he further explores these themes
and other fascinations through a series of twenty pins. What makes this
new exhibit especially compelling is that each pin is mounted in its
own beautifully rendered notebook page, based on the pocket notebook
drawings in which Coates conceives the jewel design. These ‘pages’
invite the viewer into the artwork; they allow us a glimpse into the
inner workings of the mind of the artist. The pin form has essentially
liberated Coates
from many of the practical constraints traditionally associated with
functional jewelry, and in this collection he revels in that freedom,
offering an intoxicating commingling of jewelry, sculpture, drawing,
painting, and collage. Coates is, of course, proficient in all of these
disciplines, and the fact that each piece is also sculpture, collage
and jewel makes this a uniquely rich and exciting collection.
As is his trademark, each piece is a meditation, a musing into themes
that rouse, inspire, perplex, and delight the human spirit. In Enneagram
IV, Coates explores both the natural world, and our natural desire to
understand ourselves, in the form of a twenty karat gold frog clasping
a rainbow moonstone. The humble frog is splayed across black slate that
has been engraved with the enneagram, an ancient geometrical code to
understanding personality types, popularized in the West by mystic G.
I. Gurdjieff. In An Airship for Baron M., Coates evokes memories of
his childhood; he revisits his preoccupation with model ships with an
intricately carved ship in luminous twenty karat gold prepared to be
buoyed aloft by a plump eighteenth-century Delft glass bead. In Cerambus,
Coates makes dramatic use of two beetle parts—a stag beetle head
found by his mother and abdomen case—and an iridescent opal to
recount Ovid’s fateful tale of the lyre-playing shepherd who pays
for indiscretions and lack of good judgment by metamorphosing into a
beetle.
Coates and his wife Nel Romano happen to be extremely skillful musicians,
and historically Coates’s work resonates with music, particularly
Mozart. In this new collection, Mozart makes an especially delightful
appearance in Wolfgang’s Button, which was inspired by a letter
that Mozart wrote to a patroness in which he confessed his hankering
for a set of mother-of-pearl buttons he had seen in a certain store.
Coates has created a button that would more than fulfill Mozart’s
desire, made of mother-of-pearl, inlaid with a variegated > citrine
as the sun, a carved mother-of-pearl crescent moon, and seven spangled
moonstone stars. The button rests upon a recycled bone ‘scrap’
of paper, engraved with the retailer’s message-to-self to reserve
the set for Mozart.
Several of the pins draw specifically from artwork in the Wallace Collection,
the renowned museum devoted to fine and decorative arts from the fifteenth
to the nineteenth centuries, which has been a source of inspiration
for Coates since he was a student (he is now the Collection’s
Associate Artist for the next two years). An idyllic Tuscan landscape
detailed on one of the Collection’s majolica bowls was in part
what drove Coates to create the exquisite castle of twenty karat gold,
coral and chrysoprase resting on a cloud of opal in Castle-In-The-Air.
The hushing figure of L’Amour, who makes a (borrowed) appearance
in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, is borrowed yet again
by Coates in his gorgeous Fragonard’s L’amour Volé;
Coates’s Love is rendered in twenty karat gold, his body a glowing
pink and green Baroque pearl, and his wings a matching feathery fan
of mother-of-pearl. 
The Wallace Collection also contains numerous images of dead hares but
Coates’s Lunar Hare, carved in twenty karat gold and boasting
a piercing yellow sapphire eye is—happily—living, perched
on its planetary influence, a young crescent moon against a black mother-of-pearl
sky.
In an illustrious career that has spanned over three decades, Coates
has exhibited all over the world and his jewels, tablepieces, medals,
and trophies are held in numerous prestigious public and private collections
including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Royal
Museum of Scotland, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, and the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, among many others. Like turning the pages
of a book, A Notebook of Pins offers an intimate view into Coates’s
remarkable creative process, and invites us on a journey to discover
our own personal meanings as well.
|
