An extract from Skinner, Damian, and Kevin Murray. 2014. __Place and Adornment: A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand__. Auckland, N.Z.: Bateman. ### Ornament of our time Diamonds provided the English throne with rare symbols of prestige. During the reign of King George III, diamonds were imported from Bengal as gifts to be exchanged between the king and queen. Queen Charlotte served her husband well, bearing fifteen children, and her frequently extended belly was adorned by a stomacher featuring large diamonds in a pattern of flowers on a fine network of smaller diamonds. At the time, the British Empire needed to replace some of the jewels in its crown. After the loss of the North American colony, and the threat of Napoleonic France, Britain had to urgently secure a place for loyal subjects that could provide much needed materials, particularly wood. King George commissioned James Cook to gain new knowledge from the other side of the world. From Cook's discoveries emerged the prospect of a Pacific base to help secure the empire's interests. The loyalty of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand is still evident today; both continue to acknowledge the English monarch as their head of state two centuries after British colonisation. Yet in the development of these southern nations there is tension between their identification with Britain and the drive to create a place of their own -- which includes some kind of accommodation with the indigenous peoples. The creation of one's own jewellery is one way of easing this tension. Traditionally aristocracy has provided a stage on which the feats of craftsmanship and design in jewellery could be publically acknowledged. With the growth of democracy in modernity, the stage has moved from the royal court to the art gallery. As a result of the post-World War II contemporary jewellery movement, we can look to public exhibitions as sites to appreciate the ornament of our time. Rather than harkening back to the tradition of splendour, the new democratic jewellery places value on originality, thus providing countries like Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand with an opportunity to define their value beyond the shadow of imperial splendour. Many stories have been told about the cultural confidence that emerged from the antipodes in the twentieth century. We have heard about innovative Australasian schools of painting, literature and cinema. But the story of jewellery's emergence in the twentieth century has been overlooked. This story brings to the fore the challenges of a settler society negotiating between the metropolitan centre and its indigenous cultures. And from the context of similar challenges, it reveals stark differences in the kinds of journeys taken by settler societies. In particular, it presents the creative activity of individual jewellers who strove to re-fashion preciousness to fit a modern democratic society. The contemporary jewellery movement represents the transformation of European gold- and silver-smithing skills and traditions away from the intrinsic value of precious materials towards forms of creative expression, initially artistic innovation, and then a host of other cultural and social values that enable jewellers to deeply engage with the society in which they live. Jewellery defines what is valuable in a given society. Symbolic jewellery such as the crown jewels testifies to the kingdom's expanse by featuring stones from exotic lands. Specialist skills evolve to deal with unique materials, and a national project develops to deal with what is precious to that country and those people. Contemporary jewellery refines this project beyond the literal, allowing engagement with cultures and places that fall outside the possibilities of conventional jewellery. And as jewellery develops throughout the world, it raises the question of whether value is defined by tradition from elsewhere or emerges as an expression of place. ### Place, adornment and contemporary jewellery The various practices we are discussing in this book are encompassed by the term 'contemporary jewellery'. With that term we are describing a self-reflexive craft practice that critically explores the nature of jewellery and is oriented to the body. [^1] Contemporary jewellery began in the 1940s and 1950s with objects made from precious materials that privileged artistic expression. It continued with the critique of preciousness, in which jewellery's value was separated from the intrinsic value of the materials from which it was made (such as diamonds and gold). Freed from such fixed ideas of value, contemporary jewellery was able to grapple with new concerns: artistic expression and conceptual ideas; a renewed interest in the body; and a kind of democratic engagement. There are a number of other terms used to describe these objects: studio jewellery, art jewellery and author jewellery are probably the most popular. Generally the kind of jewellery we are talking about is studio jewellery -- that is, jewellery designed and fabricated by the same person within a studio or small workshop setting, as unique objects or in a limited production run. Art jewellery and author jewellery are also useful terms in identifying significant aspects of the kind of objects we are dealing with, as they suggest the importance of artistic expression within this practice of jewellery. We have settled on the term contemporary jewellery because it is in popular use in Australasia, and because it incorporates these other terms, though is not limited by them. While much of the jewellery we discuss is a form of studio jewellery, not all of it is. And while the story of contemporary jewellery's encounter with fine art is an important part of our history, it isn't the only story. And although contemporary jewellery as a vehicle for the intentions and artistic concepts of the maker is central to what we discuss, we are also interested in maintaining an awareness of jewellery's other functions -- such as its value to, and meanings for, the wearer. Contemporary jewellery is a broad enough term to include all these dimensions, as well as recognise the way such practices have returned at different moments to the heritage of traditional or conventional jewellery. There are many ways to write a history of contemporary jewellery. It could be based on materials or processes, or biography, or it could be thematic or chronological. The title of this book, *Place and Adornment: A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australasia*, indicates the various strategies we favour. This is a history, a chronological account of contemporary jewellery in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand that pays particular attention to the ways in which location (environment, history, cultural forces) affects contemporary jewellery production. By 'place' we mean a geographical region that is, as Marc Auge puts it, 'relational, historical and concerned with identity'.[^2] Place refers to an environment that becomes a reference point and source of identification for the people who live in or near it, and it is charged with emotion and memory. In a sense, place is space that has been given boundaries and is no longer abstract, unidentified or endless, precisely because of the memories, feelings, cultural practices and histories of the people who occupy these locations. As Liesbeth den Besten writes, 'Places are both material and mental constructions; they are locations or sites, as well as personal, intangible and mythical webs of associations and memories.'[^3] Space becomes place through the actions of people -- and also through objects, which is where craft might play a special role. As Paul Greenhalgh writes, craft could be defined as '"portable places"; objects that exude a sense of permanence, history and symbolic weight. A *space* filled with such objects has the potential to become a *place*.' [^4] Given the importance of materials within jewellery, place will also have relevance in terms of physical stuff -- minerals, and plant and animal material -- that can be adapted into wearable objects. Adornment is a meta-category of wearable objects -- contemporary jewellery, for example, is a subset of adornment. While the word 'jewellery' refers to a Western practice of making wearable items, and thus involves Western values and concepts, the use of the word 'adornment' has the advantage of suggesting a particular association with indigenous objects which don't always fit easily into the category of jewellery or contemporary jewellery. In titling this book *Place and Adornment,* we are signalling the importance of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand as settler societies, in which the land and cultural contact (often cultural conflict) between indigenous and settler populations has been a central force in the development of contemporary jewellery. One of the main themes of our book, and one of the reasons why we have chosen the title *Place and Adornment*, is the phenomenon of primitivism in contemporary jewellery made in Australasia. Primitivism refers to the common twentieth century tendency of western artists to look outside their own traditions towards cultures and art forms from other parts of the world.[^5] In general, this is inspired by the notion that western art is exhausted and a way forward may only be established with an injection of new blood -- the vigour and energy of cultural products created beyond the borders of western civilisation, products supposedly not affected by rationality or sophistication but instead original, primary, informed by a closeness to the fount of creativity. Primitivism is therefore a concept that refers to western, or in our case, settler Australian and New Zealand art. It signals the interest in and influence of the cultures and art forms of non-western societies manifested by western artists. It is, in other words, a quality of settler Australian and New Zealand art works, and refers to settler attitudes and beliefs towards Aboriginal and Māori art practices.[^6] Primitivism is one of the main ways that contemporary jewellers in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand worked out their relationship to place, in part by making explicit references to indigenous adornment practices. This, as we will show, was less common in Australia than Aotearoa New Zealand, partly because of differences in colonial history, but it was also discarded in Australia because of the ways in which the Australian contemporary jewellers chose to position themselves in terms of place -- not by embracing it, and playing up primitivism as happened in Aotearoa New Zealand, but by arguing against the relevance of place to the creative process. Interestingly, some Australasian contemporary jewellery at the beginning of the twenty-first century seems to return to primitivism, but conditionally, as if seeking to create a primitivism without reference to the 'primitive'. It is in some ways a contentious thing to write a history of contemporary jewellery in Australasia that emphasises place. It suggests that the context and location of contemporary jewellery is critical to understanding what these objects and practices are. It challenges the model of autonomous artistic expression, in which all that matters is the creative intentions of the maker. It introduces complex questions of colonial history and identity formation for both indigenous and settler populations, and suggests that contemporary jewellery can, and should, be understood according to these issues. We acknowledge that contemporary jewellers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand are justifiably concerned about finding themselves typecast. When a European narrative takes on universal status, as has happened in the contemporary jewellery field, any reference to locality becomes a problem. If place becomes a key analytical tool, jewellers from Australasia will be trapped as Australian or New Zealand jewellers, marginalised when compared to European jewellers who get to be contemporary jewellers without the burden of being marked by place.[^7] And yet it seems to us that deeply engaging with the local is precisely what is required in order to tackle the exclusionary structures of international discussions around contemporary jewellery. Until now, writing about contemporary jewellery has been quite narrow in its focus, and unwilling or unable to consider the way the various practices and issues of contemporary jewellery have spread around the world. To understand contemporary jewellery properly, to write its history, it is necessary to look beyond the contexts where the dominant modes of the practice -- such as modernism, or the critique of preciousness -- emerged (for example, Germany or the Netherlands) and to consider how such things travel to other places. The way modernism in contemporary jewellery is resisted, modified, accepted or misinterpreted in Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand is as much part of the history of modernism as its origins within German or North American jewellery. When a regional jewellery discourse (whether European or North American) is allowed to masquerade as an international jewellery discourse, the inevitable result is a relationship that is structured around dependency and inferiority. This book, then, with its interlocking case studies from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, is an opportunity to describe the uneven development of the modes of contemporary jewellery in this part of the world, and thus to tackle the myth that contemporary jewellery is first, and best, manifested in Europe and only partially, badly or exotically practiced elsewhere.[^8] In so doing, the book not only seeks to allow a truly international participation in contemporary jewellery (in which makers from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand can take part), but also to reveal the richness and diversity of contemporary jewellery as an international phenomenon. Finally, in articulating a regional perspective about contemporary jewellery in Australasia, we are keen to contribute to a growing awareness of the practices of contemporary craft in the Southern Hemisphere, and to contribute to a body of scholarship which articulates points of history and principles of practice that ground jewellery in this part of the world. Both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have historically positioned themselves in relation to the Northern Hemisphere, looking to centres such as Munich or Amsterdam for information, inspiration and validation. There are many historical reasons why these relationships are primary, but there are also increasing opportunities to think differently about such connections. Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand could, for example, re-imagine themselves as part of a South-South dialogue, in which the main points of reference are other countries below the Tropic of Cancer. While our focus on Australasian contemporary jewellery means that our book cannot do anything to specifically encourage such rethinking, it is offered as a model of a regional history that jewellers and scholars could use in the service of alternative networks. ### Trans-Tasman histories The previous two books about contemporary jewellery in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, both written by Patricia Anderson, set a precedent for articulating an Australasian point of view regarding contemporary jewellery practice in this part of the world. In the first one, *Contemporary Jewellery: The Australian Experience 1971--1987* (1988), a small number of New Zealanders were included by turning them into honorary Australians.[^9] But the same is not true of Anderson's second book, *Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand* (1998). Arguing that 'because there are so few books devoted to contemporary jewellery in either Australia or New Zealand, I have taken the broadest possible view of this art form in both countries today', Anderson made it clear that the poverty of publications was not her only reason for undertaking a comparative study. 'It will be immediately apparent that in Australia there is no identifiable "type" of contemporary work flourishing at the expense of another and it is quite impossible to talk about a national style. This, however, is not the case in New Zealand where much of the finest work being made has an immediate and identifiable flavour.'[^10] To contrast Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand was to be able to deal with two distinct histories and practices of contemporary jewellery: one of which has given place the slip, and the other of which valorises the local. The same point was made by Bernice Murphy in her foreword to the book. The linkage of the two countries was not 'merely a matter of good cultural neighbourship', wrote Murphy, but instead 'discloses how particularities of place, psychological relationships and social affinities have influenced outcomes and conditioned imagery and forms of production in quite contrasting ways in Australia and New Zealand.'[^11] According to Murphy, New Zealand crafts were irrevocably shaped by an intense awareness of the land, which was, along with the effect of Māori cultural and spiritual practices, behind the investment in natural materials that most strongly characterised jewellery from New Zealand. 'The fondness for certain stones and other naturally formed materials also carries a concern with time, sequence, connections and layering: with geological time mapped across cultural time-scales; with an awareness of underlying order and informing structures, as well as a vivid attention to local details and whatever is found randomly within the world.'[^12] In contrast, Australian contemporary jewellery was shaped by the social experience of one of the most intensely urbanised societies in the world, in which relationship to land was split between an indigenous viewpoint that 'unite\[s\] people, land, community and history in extraordinarily intimate ways', and an urban dweller awareness of the vast continental interior that was grounded 'in large metropolitan concentrations around a few capital cities, mostly on seaboards'.[^13] As a result, contemporary jewellery in Australia was characterised by a greater sense of mixing and fusion, rather than an encounter with indigenous adornment. 'Such characteristics reveal a strong pressure of global connections that work both to fetishise any remaining possibility of the "local", while also tearing local affinities apart in the colliding influences of an inter-mediated, communications-pressured world of late-twentieth-century cultural meltdown.'[^14] There are no doubt many differences between contemporary jewellery in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and accounting for these is part of what this book sets out to achieve. Given the broadly similar histories and the many points of connection between the two countries (including in the field of contemporary jewellery), it is always interesting to identify and account for difference through a comparative analysis, which tends to bring such things into a sharper and richer focus. And yet writing a combined history of Australasian jewellery does something interesting to the binary that Anderson and Murphy quite reasonably identify. To produce this history is to make contemporary jewellery in Aotearoa New Zealand less parochial and provincial, and to make contemporary jewellery in Australia more so. New Zealand jewellers have generally proved reluctant to engage with the world at large, and even with their colleagues across the Tasman, instead looking inward and privileging the local and unique. In contrast, Australian jewellers have, from very early moments in the history of contemporary jewellery, projected themselves offshore and insistently pursued a place within a larger, international narrative of contemporary jewellery. Both perspectives, of course, are myths: New Zealand jewellers are entirely affected by the currents of international jewellery, while Australian jewellers haven't been able to escape the problem of distance and the hierarchy of metropolitan centre and provincial outpost. By joining the histories together and trying to write from some equally mythical single perspective in the middle of the Tasman, these myths become easier to identify, and other possible ways of thinking about the history of contemporary jewellery in Australasia come into being. The challenge is that since there is nothing solid in the ocean to stand on, which country gets to set the conversation: the continent or the islands? We should emphasise that this is a history of contemporary jewellery in Australasia, not a history of contemporary jewellery in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand that has been soldered together by some judicious phrases ('meanwhile, across the Tasman'). It is a difficult task for a number of reasons. While any history necessarily excludes certain individuals, institutions and events, this one, already based on the priorities of place as a framework, has to balance the fact that there are more Australian jewellers than New Zealand ones, which means that if you give equal attention to each country, Australia is diminished and New Zealand is exaggerated. It also means that sometimes there are issues that are more important to one place than another, or that some issues will be discussed through jewellers from one country rather than both. The point is not to be comprehensive, or balanced, but to identify what an Australasian, as opposed to an Australian and New Zealand history, might look like. ### A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australasia This book tells the story of the contemporary jewellery movement in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The movement in Australasia begins with the arrival of a group of European goldsmiths and silversmiths in the 1960s and 1970s. This migration is a useful starting point because it marks the moment when the skills and conceptual structures of European contemporary jewellery washed ashore down under. But this is more than a story of 'cultural catch-up', where peripheral cultures strive to stay in touch with trends emerging from metropolitan centres. While the Australasian concept of contemporary jewellery is drawn largely from Europe, there is an eventual acknowledgement of the indigenous practices of adornment that preceded colonisation. As a result, in chapter 1 our story starts much earlier than the 1960s. We take in the range of adornment within Aboriginal and Māori societies; the jewellery of settler contact with indigenous peoples -- taking the form of references to native flora, fauna and culture within European gold- and silver-smithing, as well as examples of indigenous material culture turned into jewellery; and the important precedent of Arts and Crafts jewellery in the early twentieth century. In different ways, as we will show, the characteristics of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand as settler societies (in which the dynamics between settler European and indigenous peoples affects history and cultural practices) get picked up in later contemporary jewellery from this part of the world, to greater or lesser degrees. The nations of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand emerged as British colonies. Australia was a dumping ground for convicts, which left an enduring class division between commoners and gentry. Aboriginal culture was dismissed, particularly its ornamental practices. On the other hand, class difference was less marked in Aotearoa New Zealand and relations with Māori were more reciprocal. Though Australia became the source of precious metals and stones, the jewellery that emerged was generic. After World War II, both countries received migrants from Northern Europe who brought with them a sensibility for jewellery as an art form, rather than a mere trade. This is the subject of chapter 2, which explores who arrived (and when) and the way in which the philosophies of modernism they brought in their work and practices fitted into wider discourses of craft and culture in Australasia. It also sketches out some differences across the Tasman; in Australia, the modernist immigrants played a leading role in the structures that would support contemporary jewellery, including teaching institutions and industry organisations, while in Aotearoa New Zealand their effect was more localised: it was about establishing an audience for contemporary jewellery and training a new generation of jewellers through apprenticeship schemes. In the late 1970s a new generation of self-taught jewellers sought to reflect on their sense of place, which is the subject of chapter 3. Australasian jewellers engaged with the critique of preciousness, in which contemporary jewellery used new materials, as well as becoming self-reflexive or self-critical. The critique of preciousness provided local jewellers with the tools to open jewellery up to the specific issues and agendas of the 1970s, and to grapple with distinctive forms of identity that were unfolding in both countries during that decade. Much of the contemporary jewellery of the period represented a primitivist ethic. In chapter 4 we focus on the moment, in 1982, when German jeweller Hermann Jünger toured Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, conducting workshops and connecting with key players in the Australasian contemporary jewellery scene. We present this as an important turning point in the history of contemporary jewellery in both countries, with Jünger effectively affirming the existence of contemporary jewellery in this part of the world and laying down a model that had an impact on many jewellers in Australasia. In chapter 5 we track the definite division that emerges between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1980s, with jewellers in each country responding to the experimental turn in contemporary jewellery in quite different ways. Thanks to government support, a number of opportunities were made for Australian jewellers to show their work internationally and to insert themselves into international contexts. The focus became more studio-based, specialist and aligned to an individual artistic trajectory, rather than collective issues such as place. In Aotearoa New Zealand, contemporary jewellery's engagement with adornment, the body and social issues became increasingly focused around a Pacific identity in the use of techniques and materials from the region. By the 1990s, government support in Australasia had declined and jewellers sought alternatives to the visual arts model. As we discuss in chapter 6, contemporary jewellery began to consider its heritage as jewellery, and became interested in production and its potential as a form of object and practice with an intimate potential to insinuate itself into everyday life and the personal narratives of wearers. Place, in the 1990s, is as likely to be considered in terms of networks and subcultural groups as it is in terms of materials or historical forms. In Aotearoa New Zealand an intensive dialogue around postcolonialism develops in the context of some of the discussions around place that were critical in the previous decade. In both countries, a number of jewellers affirm a connection with Europe, expressed through a relationship with the contemporary jewellery scene in Munich. Finally, our history concludes with a series of reflections in chapter 7 about how contemporary jewellery practice in Australasia since 2000 has shaped our understanding of what makes jewellery in this part of the world interesting, distinctive and important -- and thus shaped the history we have written in this book. The critique of preciousness evolves to include use of valueless materials such as trash and then the dissolution of materials altogether. The twenty-first century sees the rise of various notions of collectivity, related to the DIY movement, which pushes critical jewellery practice in new directions by emphasising its potential as a catalyst for creating and sustaining networks and engagements between people. We address encounters between settler and indigenous (a strong feature of contemporary jewellery in Australia in the period 2000--2010 and a continuing theme in contemporary jewellery in Aotearoa New Zealand). We then explore the flourishing phenomenon of jewellery relating to nature (often as a personal encounter rather than a loaded national identity statement). The development of contemporary jewellery in Australasia owes much to people, philosophies and practices imported from the North, but both countries have turned these imports to their own ends. It is our hope that this demonstrates how contemporary jewellery can recognise the diversity of preciousness in the world's regions.