Second hand jewellery Project | 2009/2011

Found objects, silver, steel wire, silk thread, velvet, cardboard and upholstery.

Almost every person owns a few jewellery piece that they don’t wear anymore. This could be one of many reasons. The piece could be broken, out of fashion, a gift that they didn’t want, lost its sentimental value with the ending of relationship or the owner has just lost interest in it.

The aim of the Second Hand Jewellery Project is to explore how objects, in this case jewellery, can go from being valuable to valueless and visa versa.

I started the project by collecting old, broken and unwanted jewellery from friends and family. Most of the jewellery collected were jewellery in the traditional sense, mass manufactured and costume jewellery, with no real material value.

The boxes and the containers of the jewellery pieces interest me as much as the jewellery pieces itself. Therefore, I made new jewellery pieces out of the old ones by incorporating the velvet packaging or box that came with the jewellery or I made a new packaging for it and then framed it in silver.

By placing the existing jewellery piece in a new context,  the physical function and definition of the object is questioned. The semantic characteristics were undermined by placing certain binary opposites against each other, e.g. old and new, broken and intact, machine made and handmade. The Second Hand Jewellery Project points out the arbitrary and seemingly natural way we assign value to objects.


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