People, Objects and Making: redefining practice

Abstract

This paper explores my relationship with jewellery: how I have sought to both extend my audience and expand on notions of what and who my audience is and can be. Though increasing numbers of students graduate each year, contemporary jewellery can at times be very inward facing. Along with an aging and declining collector base and an ever-decreasing number of specialist galleries, this lead me, as a research-led practitioner, to question whom was I making jewellery for and who was my audience?

Using Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, I unpacked notions of insularity within contemporary jewellery using three projects I have worked on as case studies. The first project This is Me explores how a project is reshaped when the audience are encouraged to become participants and control over its direction is placed in their hands. The second case study JUNK: rubbish to gold investigates how audiences can be activated to become active participants, promoters and consumers of the project by integrating notions of circular economies both digitally and physically throughout a jewellery specific project by integrating notions of circular economies both digitally and physically throughout a jewellery specific project. The third case study Mother Makers begins to look at how it might be possible to use the discipline’s inward facing tendencies to the benefit of a group which is often, though unintentionally, pushed out to the peripheries - that of recent mothers.

I argue that through applying Bourdieu’s concept of habitus we can begin to understand why it is hard to reach out to different audiences in our projects and suggest ways to in which we as practitioners can begin to rethink who we make our work for and why.