Thoughts

                  What exactly is Jewellery?    What is its Purpose?

For most people, the experience of jewellery will be confined to the offerings on the high street, with small-c-conservative, mass-market jewellers supplying gold and silver for most everyday needs. Below this is cheap-and-cheerful costume jewellery to be worn then forgotten, and at the top end very high quality materials and craftsmanship.  In between is the designer-jewellery market, where some gold but mostly silver and semi-precious stones are worked primarily by craftspeople professionally trained in art & design.

However, jewellery is not merely another craft. It aspires to the same philosophical considerations as any of the fine arts and has the same characteristics prevalent in other great art-forms. It relies on originality; innovation and experimentation in materials; ideas; technology and techniques. Equally, it has a long and distinguished history, informing us of previous cultures, sometimes the only artefacts that have lasted, going back  beyond Saxon times, to the ancient Egyptians and earlier. It also has a very solid, traditional approach to technique and craft skills that has served it well over the years.

For most people, the purpose of jewellery is to enhance and articulate with the body. It may have no deeper function than to complete an outfit. Wearability goes without question. Whatever, the decision to purchase tends to be very personal. It might be to make a statement; to represent an emotion; to be political - considering recycling, for example; to represent some aspect of the wearer.  Consciously or unconsciously, there has to be something about a piece of jewellery that strikes a chord with the potential purchaser.

Perhaps because we are usually dealing with an expensive, precious material, we tend to have an almost reverential attitude towards it, but this attitude was severely tested in the 1980's when a new approach was promulgated, surprisingly from the Netherlands.   Just as in fine art, where young turks challenge and overturn the conventional view and philosophy and art moves on, with The New Jewelry, Robert Smit and Gijs Bakker, taking opposing views, revolutionised thinking about jewellery, moving it into the field of conceptual art. No longer should wearability be all, and there was a complete open season on the use of materials - gold, silver, stones, paper, steel, aluminium, found objects, photos, cloth, and plastics.

Nowadays, we have a broad church that allows for individual designers and craftspeople to produce work of enormous diversity.

We have all become beneficiaries.