Wild blooms inspire rare pieces
A new jewellery exhibition reflects a South Australian artist’s interest in flora, fauna, and history, writes Warren Feeney.
For almost 30 years, Australian artist and metalsmith Julie Blyfield has crafted meticulous jewellery, reconsidering the possibilities of Australia’s flora and fauna as a subject and beginning for her work.
The recipient of the prestigious South Australian Living Artist Award in 2007, Blyfield’s brooches, earrings, and necklaces have been acclaimed internationally with success measured in public by the international galleries and museums representing her in their collections.
Moreover, reviewing a survey of her jewellery in 2006 for London’s Guardian Weekly, Australian academic and feminist Germaine Greer enthused about Blyfield’s Press Desert Plant brooches that ‘‘such gentleness and subtlety are not often associated with my birthplace’’.
Blyfield was recently in Christchurch installing Rare Collection, a new series of work at The National. Rare Collection isa jewellery exhibition influenced by the first illustrated book of Australian plants, Wild Flowers of South Australia, by then local resident Fanny de Mole in 1861.
Director of The National, Caroline Billing, was approached by Blyfield, requesting a solo exhibition more than a year ago, developing this current series for her gallery. Billing was enthused to take up the offer. ‘‘We are lucky to have her in Christchurch. This was special. Having known her exquisite work and reputation for a long time, I also knew an exhibition by Julie needed to be shared wider than Christchurch. I facilitated a public gallery tour for her show to Objectspace in Auckland, and a two-day contemporary jewellery workshop through Manukau Institute of Technology.’’
As a contemporary Australian jeweller who established her practice in the late 1980s, Blyfield is well-versed in the notion of workshops and with contemporary NZ jewellery. All the links are to be found in her 23-year association with the pioneering Gray Street Workshop in Sydney. She says that Gray St was a place ‘‘where I could work amongst like-minded people. We hosted visiting and access jewellers from Australia and overseas. It was exciting to form a community of contemporary jewellers. It provided me with the opportunity to travel and exhibit locally, nationally and overseas.
‘‘For a period of three years, we also ran an exhibition programme. This included showing the work of our long-standing connections across the Tasman with jewellers from Fluxus in Dunedin [Lynn Kelly, Kobi Bosshard, and the late George Beer]. In 1994, I was resident at Fluxus workshop and Lynn Kelly and George Beer worked at Gray Street Workshop for a while. I felt enormously privileged in 2016 to be able to reconnect with Kobi Bosshard, Lynn Kelly, and others such as Ann Culy. To reflect on how we have remained friends and colleagues for more than two decades is truly amazing.’’
In returning to New Zealand for Rare Collection, what were the attractions and challenges in developing contemporary jewellery from a publication more than 150 years old?
‘‘I am inspired by working with new resource material as it keeps my work ‘fresh’ and open to trying new ideas and approaches. After 30 years of practice, I feel it’s important to ‘look out’, otherwise ideas can become a bit stale. New visual stimulation is vital for me to avoid losing interest in my work.
‘‘I am interested in history and how records and publications can provide inroads into past lives and thinking about the world at that time. It was amazing that Fanny de Mole lived such a short life – only 31 years – and yet managed to create such a beautiful botanical album as a record of the flora which grew in the area where she lived in the early 1800s. It was about her connection and experience at the time and the place where she lived in an era of documenting, recording and reflecting on the new environment in which the settlers found themselves. I can look back at the album and can greatly appreciate it for her contribution, her level of skill, and the beautiful aesthetic qualities of her work from 19th century.’’
However, Blyfield also maintains that the challenges of using such material is not to simply replicate the original.
‘‘I tried to capture the ‘printerly’ qualities of her prints. The layers of colour and the graphic line qualities as well. I usually go about making by taking photographs, sketches, paper maquettes, so I can quickly move on and quite ‘spontaneously’ respond to the material at hand. Once I get a sense of the work I go through a process of ‘refining and honing’ my designs. It’s a fine balance between spontaneity and the resolution of an idea.
‘‘I was conscious of trying to have a ‘light feel’ to the work. I knew colour had to be incorporated and some linear qualities like the prints on which they were based. I like to think that there is another layer built, rather than lost in interpretation. I never try to truly ‘replicate’ the botanical paintings in my medium. I am not capable of that. I only reference them as a starting point for a new idea.’’
In addition to Blyfield’s jewellery, Rare Collection also includes digital images from Wildflowers of South Australia , in the form of Fanny de Mole’s handcoloured lithographs. With de Mole unassumingly modest in her description of her illustrations as ‘‘not as having any botanical pretensions, but simply as a Book of Flowers’’, it is difficult not to see Blyfield also sharing this sense of restraint, grounded in the fundamentals of making jewellery, mentoring emerging jewellers, lecturing, presenting workshops and educating to spread the good news about contemporary jewellery.
‘‘I feel very fortunate to be able to work at what I love doing and the support I have received over the past 30 years from Arts South Australia and the Australia Council. To travel and meet amazing professionals, other jewellers and to experience the ‘high and lows’’ of any practice – it is an amazing life.
It’s unpredictable and everchanging. So I wouldn’t swap for anything. I just have to keep the aging body fit enough to maintain the practice! But there’s another challenge indeed.’’ ❚ Julie Blyfield, Rare Collection, The National, 241 Moorhouse Ave, until December 17