Brooch The Subject

The Sunday Age

Sunday April 1, 2007

Claire Halliday

Melbourne's jewellers are just as inspired by skyscrapers as they are by trinkets. Claire Halliday talks architecture with jewellers.

Architects and jewellers do the same job, just to different scales. By adorning our body with jewellery, we are, in a way, inhabiting the work. When architects add skirting boards to mask the spaces where floor meets wall, they are accessorising a building. Think of cornices as eyebrow rings.

In recent years, though, there's been a surprising amount of cross-pollination between the crafts. Sometimes it's literal: consider Frank Gehry's recent jewellery collection for Tiffany's. Sometimes it's a complementary aesthetic: state architect John Denton is married to eminent jewellery designer Susan Cohn.

But now a collaborative exhibition by Abbotsford jeweller Blanche Tilden and metalsmith Phoebe Porter has taken the link between architecture and jewellery that bit further, producing a series of pieces inspired by Melbourne's 170-year-old Hoddle Grid.

For Tilden, beauty can be found in "the patterns and repeated elements in buildings, signage, machinery, transport" of the city's architecture.

"My eye turned to it and I have drawn on this almost overwhelming source of visual information as inspiration for my work," she says of her works in glass, titanium, gold, silver and platinum. "The constant exposure to repeated forms - the grid of the CBD, the patterns made when windows in high-rise office buildings are lit up at night, signage and advertising, the use of materials like steel mesh or glass, for example, in Federation Square, or the stained grey concrete of the footpath. There is so much detail to observe and draw on for inspiration."

Tilden says she has always been a keen observer of gradual changes in form and colour, a passion she discovered while working as a child on her family's farm in country Victoria.

"It was my job to sort and pack endless trays of plums, grading them by eye for size and ripeness. I really enjoyed the sorting and choosing and also observing the repeated patterns and subtle changes in shape, colour and texture of the fruit," she says. "Since childhood, I have had the strong desire to make things, and have collected anything that was available in multiples. For example, shells at the beach, or discarded betting slips during a day spent at the races with my dad - whatever was at hand at the time."

Today, Tilden, 38, has taken her eye for repetition to become one of a handful of Melbourne jewellery designers who view their works as micro-architecture rather than as sparkly accessories to complement an outfit.

As the curator at Flinders Lane's Craft Victoria gallery, Kate Rhodes is familiar with the link between jewellery design and architectural planning. Later this year, the store is holding a forum on the symbiotic relationship between the two professions.

"Not all jewellery is mini-architecture but, yes, some of it can certainly be seen that way," Rhodes says, adding that decoration and purely ornamental aesthetics are a big part of architecture. "Jewellery takes on new dimensions in the physical world - that is, when it is on the body - but a lot of jewellery that might be considered to have a relationship with architecture doesn't need the body for this kind of injection. Its structure or materials means that it wants to hang off the body, rather than on it. For example, think about neck ruffs or safety pins through the nose or Susan Cohn's Ariel and Doughnut necklace and bracelet."

Wearing her modernist architectural influences firmly on her brooch, Tilden says that one of her favourite buildings is the Joseph Paxton-designed Crystal Palace - created for the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Other architecture-related influences came from a stint during the late 1990s when she trained with jeweller Susan Cohn and saw husband John Denton's work up close. "Seeing his work and creative process was extremely exciting and energising," Tilden says.

Tilden's latest work - a collaboration with metalsmith Phoebe Porter - is entitled General Assembly and makes up part of the Solutions For Better Living exhibition, which opened on March 7 at Craft Victoria.

"We both love simple structural forms which play on the qualities of materials and allude to architectural ideas," Tilden says. "During the design phase for this show, we spent a lot of time walking around Melbourne laneways with a camera, capturing the surfaces, patterns and shapes of the inner city, which we have incorporated into the show."

The resulting concept allows the audience to have a "pick and mix" involvement, constructing their own jewellery from the parts designed and pre-made by Tilden and Porter.

"We're really looking forward to seeing the different ways that the audience selects the parts and puts them together to make a brooch that will then become a souvenir of the experience," Tilden says.

Rather than be limited to the flat-pack mentality of commercial jewellery design - adornments mass-produced mainly in gold or silver - Rhodes says that, like cutting-edge architecture, architectural jewellery also uses a huge range of materials, including plastic, rubber, gold, glass and metals.

When it comes to other local jewellery designers meshing architectural notions with the glitter and gold of the jewellery world, Rhodes mentions David Phillips, who makes brooches that light up when you put them on, as well as the undisputed queen of jewellery design in Melbourne, Marie Funaki. Then there is RMIT graduate Robert Baines, a designer Rhodes describes as "a master of building 'model' jewellery".

"A background in classics and archaeology contribute to his construction of 'fictional' jewellery," she says.

Baines himself says that his path to jewellery design stems from his passion for creating "complex forms". "At the time, the jewellery materials were conducive to the intricacy. I was also fortunate to go to a secondary school and lived in the Eltham area, where jewellery was considered as art," Baines says.

While he says that his "simple, low-priced pieces" are "commercially fashionable", he prides himself on being "anti-fashion".

The processes involved in one of his creations? "I use unique technical skills that have been personally researched by me over a long time," he says. "I can make a piece within the hour. I sometimes make a piece over two years."

Frank Lloyd Wright once described architecture as "life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived".

For creators of these smaller architectural works, the same thought might apply. "They are at opposite ends of the spectrum - macro and micro - but both deal with the human body," Tilden says of the connection between the two. "The body is considered in the scale of both."

Blanche Tilden's work can be seen at www.blanchetilden.com.au. Her General Assembly exhibition with Phoebe Porter is at Craft Victoria until April 7.

© 2007 The Sunday Age

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