|
Women’s Tales |
Bianca Eshel-Gershuni’s jewelry is extravagant in spirit and design,
each piece a lavish mix of materials, color and narrative possibility.
Often mixing twenty-four karat gold with such quotidian materials as burlap,
bits of broken porcelain, feathers, and plastic, she creates brooches,
necklaces, earrings, and rings that, because of their baroque beauty,
seem to celebrate life even when there are obviously darker, more personal
stories behind the narratives.Vered Kaminski, on the other hand, is a formalist with a taste for abstract design and a love for the rocks and stones at your feet on a dusty road. Kaminski is also a master of negative space who can create silver necklaces that suggest elaborate paper chains or origami. Esther Knobel recycles painted tin cans into her jewelry art, which can be both playful and profound. In one of Knobel’s most moving pieces, she creates a “crowd” of dozens of matchbook-sized copper and brass medallions each featuring a human face with hollow eyes and mouths. She calls the piece Requiem, and it is clearly a memorial to those killed by violence and war. Deganit Stern Schocken brings her training as an architect to her jewelry, which sometimes suggests the grids of an urban planner’s map. The four jewelry artists are the subject of the show Women’s Tales: Four Leading Israeli Jewelers, which is now on view (through June 17, 2007) at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, before it travels to Texas, New Jersey and on to Europe and Israel. Organized by The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin, where it has already been on exhibit, the show is a fascinating glimpse of four women who are, according to the catalog, some of Israel’s most important jewelry artists. All are mature artists, the youngest is in her early fifties, and the exhibition spans several decades of each artist’s work. 
If, like me, you could not name a single contemporary Israeli jewelry artist before hearing about this show, it is understandable. In his essay for the catalog, Alex Ward, Curator of Design and Architecture at The Israel Museum, writes that Israel has lacked a strong art jewelry movement for a number of reasons, including the youth of the nation, which was officially established in 1948, and because of its unique history as a homeland for Jews from around the world. Jews moving to Israel brought their own artistic heritages with them, though by the 1940s Israeli design schools had embraced modernism, especially Bauhaus design. Still, Israel’s leading art school, the Bezalel Academy, concentrated for decades on training metals artists who could work for the commercial jewelry industry. Ward writes that it therefore took special fortitude for the four featured artists, three of whom studied at Bezalel, to make careers for themselves as jewelry artists rather than as designers for industry. Though only two of the artists in this show were born in Israel, all four have lived the major part of their lives in Israel and live and work there still. Three of the artists, Kaminski, Knobel and Stern Schocken, were certainly influenced by the avant-garde European jewelry movement of the 1970s, with its preference for industrial materials and its focus on design that embraced conceptual notions about the individual and politics. Born in 1953 in Israel, Kaminski, the youngest of the four, studied in Paris in the mid-1980s, where she developed a fascination with the rocks, stone and steel used in the construction of buildings. Returning to Israel she began making jewelry that incorporated, literally, the rocks and stones of her native land. In Necklace, 1991, Kaminski built an eighteen karat gold wire, choker-length armature in which she encased pebble-sized stones. The stones, which are shades of white, gray, rose, and brown, are not precious, nor even polished. Yet they suggest the sun-drenched, dry rock of Israel and the gold armature, despite its elegance, can be seen as a fence, perhaps a barrier around a security checkpoint. Like the work of some of the other artists, Kaminski’s work never allows you to forget that it was made in a land where security can be tenuous and where the ground itself is so coveted and so entwined with history that blood continues to be shed over who may live there and why. In a set of two Brooches, 1992, Kaminski sets brass, stainless steel and nickel silver into concrete discs. Concrete has many practical uses of course, and in war-torn areas it is prized for its stolid solidity. Concrete bunkers can keep bullets out. Concrete road barriers prevent would-be attackers from getting too close by car. Kaminski’s concrete brooches remind you that in Israel concrete is more than just a building material. It is also protective. Perhaps the brooches can ward off danger. 
Kaminski, whose work is some of the most satisfying in the show, can also make more delicate pieces, such as Necklace, 1986, a choker-length necklace that appears to be a formal, abstract piece. Looking more closely at the silver elements she has made to use as “beads” however, it is again hard not to see the “beads” as a series of metal barriers and balls of barbed wire. The piece could easily be called The Demarcation Zone. Knobel, born in 1949 in Poland, studied for a while at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work is both conceptual and sometimes narrative. In the 1970s she worked with non-precious, industrial materials and made such conceptual pieces as the intriguing Pine Tree Needles, 1977, a long necklace/chain made of anodized aluminum that she fashioned into interconnecting loops. Yet by the 1980s she was making more narrative pieces, such as Pendant, 1987, and Sportsmen Neckpiece, 1985, that seem filled with talismans and personal history. Of the four artists, Knobel also has the most playful approach. Her Sportsmen Neckpiece is made of recycled tin cans and paint, and it suggests a group of rowers or javelin throwers doing a victory dance. Stern Schocken, born in Israel in 1947, has an architect’s love for geometry, angles and structural integrity. Made generally of silver with the addition of semiprecious stones, stainless steel, shell, paper, and even fabric, her work has the spare, lean lines of an architectural rendering, perhaps combined with a diagram for some tool. Two brooches she made in 1987 look like exquisite small tools, and the fact that some of their components can slide gives them movement. She also made a group of body-conscious necklaces, such as Body Piece (City), 1993, that surely are filled with subtle movement when worn. 
Of all four artists, Eshel-Gershuni’s work is the most remarkable.
Born in 1932 in Bulgaria, Eshel-Gershuni immigrated with her family to
Palestine in 1939, and as a young woman began making jewelry even though
she had no formal training. Her work is often beautiful and probably highly
personal, and it is filled with her own iconography, such as the turtle.
In the catalog she says the turtle, with its hard, protective shell, in
recent years has come to represent her personal feelings about survival,
aging and mortality. In Turtle, Brooch, 1998, she uses modeling clay,
twenty-four karat gold leaf, paint, and metal to make a brooch that could
be a talisman from an ancient Mediterranean civilization. Her earlier work is equally expressive and as sensual. In Belt Buckle, 1973, Eshel-Gershuni uses eighteen karat gold, pearls, semiprecious stones, porcelain, and mirrors to create a belt that would have been worthy of a pagan princess. Its sensual message is clear: to unlock this buckle is to unleash flowers and leaves, jewels and pearls too delightful to be described. Eshel-Gershuni’s work alone makes this show a must-see for anyone interested in jewelry and personal expression through metal arts. Photographs by Michael Tropea and Design Partners, Inc. Visit the Museum's web site, www.bellevuearts.org |
Published
in Ornament Magazine, Volume 30, No.4, 2007. —Author Robin Updike is a regular contributor to Ornament. View This Issue Order This Issue |
|
The
Art & Craft of Personal Adornment © 1974-2008
Ornament Magazine. All rights reserved. |