Maltese jewellery designer and maker Nadège Renée Cassar, who goes by the studio name of Nadège Renée, is one of the featured artists in an online exhibition.
Cassar is showcasing the chunky ‘Offset Bangle’, which is a hand-fabricated piece made from brass and laminated copper wire at the online exhibition entitled ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’.
The exhibition showcases 247 images chosen from entries from over 55 artists representing North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Central America, Africa and Eurasia.
Hosted on the Ganoksin website, the world’s largest internet site devoted to jewellery-related topics, the exhibition is a snapshot of what jewellers around the world are exploring, and an inspiration to all.
The exhibition was conceived by Beth Wicker, an artist from South Carolina in the US, and curated by Beth and Hanuman Aspler, founder of the Ganoksin Project.
Participants range from professional jewellers with international reputations to students just learning their craft.
The drive to adorn the human body is surely as old as humankind. From pre-historic times this drive has led humans to use the materials at hand, combined with the technologies and tools available, to create objects to adorn the human body.
The oldest jewellery found to date goes back to at least 75,000 years ago in Africa.
Early jewellery was made of bones, shells, sticks, and whatever other materials the people could find and shape. Over time the ability to mine and shape metal developed, and jewellery was made from bronze, silver, gold, platinum and other metals.
Gold has long been thought of as a ‘precious’ metal, and today it is joined by silver and platinum as the three main materials modern jewellery is made from.
While much jewellery today is made from these three main metals, a large body of jewellery world-wide is still made from a much wider range of materials.
‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder focuses on jewellery made primarily of materials other than gold, platinum and silver.
Jewellers today are still using found objects such as shell and bone; they are using ‘green’ materials – upcycled and recycled objects and materials; they are using cutting-edge plastics and newly developed technology; and they are using older metals such as copper, brass and bronze.
Some of the more unusual materials include vinyl LPs, velvet, VCR components, rattlesnake vertebrae, corian, canvas, paper, crab claws, magnets, synthetic rubber electrical insulation tubing, and aluminum grounding wire.
More traditional materials used include copper, bronze, brass, glass, various types of wood, gemstones, pearls and seeds.
Techniques range from traditional metalsmithing, through a range of beading techniques, textile techniques, photography techniques and cutting-edge industrial fabrication.
www.ganoksin.com/gnkurl/beb