Tēnā koutou katoa.
He tauiwi ahau, nō Haina ōku tīpuna.
I tipu ake au ki Tāmaki Makaurau.
Kei Te Whanganui-a-Tara ahau e noho ana.
Ko Emma Ng ahau.
Kia ora, I’m Emma, and I’m curating the first Aotearoa Jewellery Triennial exhibition, which will open at Objectspace in September 2022.
In the lead up to the exhibition, I’ll be sharing some of my whakaaro (thoughts) on this blog, as well as glimpses of the new work that the makers are producing for this exhibition.
I wanted to begin by sharing some of my early thoughts around this exhibition. My starting point was the idea of jewellery in times of change. It’s almost a given that the world will one day warp beyond our recognition – in our own lifetimes climate crisis, the pandemic, and the global scale of capitalism are already transforming life as we know it. And yet, jewellery runs like a thread through millennia of human upheaval. What do the things our ancestors passed down mean to us now? What will they mean in 50, 100, or 1000 years?
Video still from The Nine Days (2018) by Guo Zixuan.
A few years ago, ST PAUL St Gallery asked me to write something for an exhibition that included work by artist Guo Zixuan. In her video artwork, “The Nine Days” (2018), the artist narrates the changing seasons in Beijing using a poem her grandmother taught her about the ‘Nines of Winter’, the days that follow the winter solstice. The poem goes:
In the first and second nine days
It is too cold to put your hand out
In the third and fourth nine days
Ice is strong enough to walk on
In the fifth and sixth nine days
See the willows turn green on the bank
In the seventh of nine days
The ice starts to dissolve in the river
In the eighth of nine days
The swallows start to come back
In the following ninth of nine days
The cattle will start work in the field
When I first saw the work, I was moved by the idea that the common wisdom passed on by a grandparent might fade in the face of forces like climate change. I wondered about the tohu (signs) we look to, to navigate our own times.
Which lessons are meant to stand the test of time, and which are meant to change in the flow of time?
In recent years, there have been growing movements that call for statues to be toppled and the names of historic benefactors to be stripped from buildings. I’ve come to think that there’s something about the way these public histories were set down in stone — the hubris of believing they would stand the test of time — that made them so fallible.
Graffiti on a statue of Captain Cook in Gisborne in 2019.
By contrast, jewellery often operates as a kind of private history, passed down and swaddled in oral histories. Jewellery connects people, tending to the relational space through the acts of retelling and remaking. History isn’t something to set down — histories need people to maintain them. It’s all about the acts of telling and retelling, and the necessity of contextualising the past for the present moment.
It’s these ideas that have determined my selection of makers for this exhibition. I have chosen artists whose work is imbued with this sense that it is the process of making itself that helps to maintain the vitality of inherited ideas and knowledge. Each of these makers sees themselves as just one in a chain of meaning-makers. Thanks for your interest in the show – in future blog posts, I’ll introduce what each of the makers is working on for this exhibition.
Top image: Detail of a collar dating to the reign of Tutankhamun, ca. 1336-1327 B.C., made from natural materials such as papyrus, olive leaves, persea leaves, nightshade berries, celery (?), faience, and dyed linen. Metropolitan Museum of Art 09.184.216.