‘More is more’
In her latest exhibition, Egyptian artist Farah Abdelhamid addresses our relationship with jewelry
Egyptian artist and jewelry maker Farah Abdelhamid’s recent experiential exhibition in Cairo was billed as a renegotiation of the relationship between jewelry and the body. It was a fascinating ‘rebranding’ of jewelry as more than just an aesthetic object.
The exhibition — “Yes, No,
Maybe So” — “explored the space between object and jewelry, what is wearable, what is not and what lies in the middle,” according to the press release, which added: “A lot of the interesting nuances of jewelry’s relationship with the body, its materials, social contexts and experience is lost in our consumer-driven world.” Abdelhamid began to formulate the ideas behind the exhibition while at the Rhode Island School of Design. They now form part of her ongoing research on the meanings that surround contemporary jewelry and its relationship to the body.
“(Often) my teachers wouldn’t understand the aesthetics of the style of my work,” she said. “They’d say that it was so loud and busy.”
Abdelhamid was intrigued by her teachers’ insistence that “Less is more.”
“I kept thinking ‘More is more.’ That really went back to history, society and the visual culture that we come from. I wanted not just to identify that from a historical point of view, but also to see how necessary it is to understand the language of jewelry,” said Abdelhamid, who is also founder and creative director of F for
Farah and Studio with Farah, a contemporary jewelry brand. “I started stripping away all the visual triggers associated to this culture and — in appreciation of minimalism and form as function
— I narrowed ( jewelry) down to an object that is in relation to the body,” she explained. “I set up different kinds of social experiments and had my friends and colleagues sit with objects, that I would record them interacting with. That is what (led) me to investigate objects in general, but also how people react to these objects (in the context of jewelry).” At the entrance to the exhibition were pedestals exhibiting Abdelhamid’s silver, gold and gold-plated-brass commercial jewelry collection.
“The pieces invite you to try them on differently,” Abdelhamid said. “The ring doesn’t fit on the finger traditionally, or the brooch hangs with a lot of sound, and it requires you to feel it differently.”
In the rest of the exhibition Abdelhamid used materials including silver, clay, silicone, fabric, thread and rice to construct wearable jewelry. On one wall was a site-specific artwork she installed at Venice Design last year.
The installation featured silicone spheres “in skin tones mimicking the moments the skin morphs to accommodate a piece of jewelry,” according to the press release.
Against another wall were shelves displaying Abdelhamid’s “more experimental jewelry,” made out of Pyrex glass. These pieces were “inspired by forms and the body’s connection to an object because they actually all fit in the hand very nicely,” she explained, adding that they were “different in the sense that they introduced the role of the wearer into the making process,” as Abdelhamid had used different forms of glass in multiple colors, and invited people to paint their own piece of glass, before turning it into wearable jewelry on the spot. In the same room was another installation — “Union” — a five-meter long necklace “made of silicone and rice-stuffed fabrics to create chain links to emphasize a mass, weight, flexibility and fragility, color and scale, similar to that of the body and skin” and described by Abdelhamid as “a play on the scale of jewelry.”
“One could carry the weight of the chain links alone or share it. It was a playful experience,” she explained. The final room contained a piece of video art by Marwan El-Gamal, as well as an installation of hollow silicone pots, hung at eye level, inviting the audience to touch them. “You could actually walk through the silicone pieces and experience them with the upper part of your body rather than just with your hands or legs as you would with the silicone necklace,” Abdelhamid said. Audience reaction was very encouraging, she added: “People were driving conversation.
They picked things up and felt comfortable playing with them. They were curious.”
I really wanted to identify the history, society and visual culture we come from.