Jewellery in the Urban Milieu: Explorations in Emergence
A practice-led PhD research project that explores how jewellery – as a practice and an artifact – can engage the situation of the city.
Coming from a background in architecture, Jacqui is interested in approaching the city as an extended site for jewellery: both the lived situation within which jewellery is often worn, and a rich material resource for its production; with jewellery sited between mobile bodies and these urban surroundings.
The research explores how jewellery practice might be embedded within the material ecology of the city through processes of making and wearing. To do this, the saprophyte – an organism that decomposes organic matter and recirculates nutrients through its ecosystem - is adopted as a logic for how jewellery can feed off and back into the city’s flows of materials and bodies. This has been explored through a series of projects responding to specific urban situations in Melbourne, Ramallah (Palestine), and Christchurch. The PhD examines what was produced within each situation, and what these projects offer for thinking about jewellery and its relations with the city.
Key people
Researcher: Jacqui Chan.