For this Project I started looking into jewellery, it wasn’t consciously considered in the making, but I knew I wanted to make a sculptural piece that plainly references an heirloom. Having considered many options I landed on jewellery; it was something that related back to my Keris work which was a ritualistic item used in ceremonies such as weddings and jewellery was just a logical step after the fact. So I reflect once more upon how in Javanese wedding processions, the bride and groom are adorned with jewellery, and the physical as well as spiritual weight that they carry. I landed on an interpretation that rendered the items useless.
According to an Online article from merdeka.com by Tantri Setyorini about Javanese bridal adornments, the 3 tiered necklace is a reminder that in life there are 3 main phases for women : birth, marriage and death.31 This concept intrigued and repulsed me, the fact that women are being told that these are the only important times of their lives is despicable. While this isn’t necessarily enforced in modern java, it certainly hasn’t been abolished. Casual misogynistic comments and ideals are acceptable and even encouraged in Indonesian society from personal experience.
From this I felt that these items, while beautiful, represented a very shallow understanding of women and their part in society. The burden that women must shoulder in the misogynistic Javanese society is heavy and painful, so I started translating this into the jewellery that I had chosen to represent.
For the Hairpin I chose to portray thorns, as well as on the earrings, whereas the necklace didn’t have any noticeable painful elements yet there was no way for anyone to link the chains holding the necklace together as I omitted the eye and hook. This was something that I aimed to convey with this offering of useless jewellery, painful jewellery. Nestled on top of a green handmade velvet pillow, the colour of velvet I'm used to when being presented jewellery in Java which was placed gingerly on a silver platter. An offering of suffering.
I felt that in using ceramics it also added a tangible weight to the objects instead of the lightness of sheets of metal. The sculpting of these objects didn't take very long and I was incredibly pleased with the quality of the objects when I finished them, although I had reservations about how they would look with the elements that were not made out of clay but they all turned out better than expected.
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