Jewellery is an especially high point of intensity in the human quest for self, individuality, and persona. Conversely, it can be the focus of an identification with a group consciousness. In this sense, jewellery has always been an aspect of a kinetic performance situation. But the kinesis in such work may be forgotten in the intention, often victorious, to make jewellery into an accepted "art-form", that is, "sculpture”. This has been a major concern of many experimental artists in the field since the fifties. In order to 'prove’ themselves as ‘artists’ within the terms of the main-line art-world and investment market, jewellers have had to assert their independence from fashion, from the body and its act of social performance. The determinant enforced onto jewellers by the modernist theoreticians of the fifties and sixties was that the art-object should be admired and contemplated within its own selected boundaries of aura. The work had to cut-away its ostensible extensions into the body, into space, into cultural and sociopolitical engagement. This, admittedly, resulted in some effective artwork, such as that of Wendy Ramshaw's lusciously shimmering ring-towers of precious metals and stones which soon made their way into the Victoria and Albert Museum as "high" art.

The work exhibited in the two recent exhibitions at Roz MacAllan's in Brisbane (Barbara Heath and Sheridan Kennedy, New Icons, 16 October - 3 November, 1987, and Concepts for Perception, (group exhibition), January 1988), frequently held the attention of a silent, static space with the same authority as 'sculpture’, causing many viewers to ponder on its translatability into a larger format. Rowena Gough's spiral breast-jewellery, fragile as the discarded shells of evanescent sea-creatures, especially encouraged such an attitude.

And Sheridan Kennedy has often offered such a contemplative pose in her work, giving her audience the chance to wear, or hang on a wall, the amulet necklaces, pins and daggers. She consciously structures the installation-display form into the function of the work, making it kinetic, relief or free-standing, as one pleases. However, Sheridan's first major public work was a performance, Venificus, at John Mills in July 1987, in which the helmets, armlets and neck-pieces were shown in action. Her work calls into play a total situation in which the viewer automatically ‘wears' the work and engages in actions signified by the piece, whether its ritualistic-protective implications, or its dynamic and forceful claiming of the right of personal space in a more aggressive statement. There is a satisfying completeness about Sheridan's work, as well as an engaging strength and directness.

Barbara Heath's art has undergone some interesting changes between the two exhibitions. Her retail work has always forced her to acknowledge the personal and public wearing-function of her work, a consideration which has, perhaps, guarded her art from the dour seriousness into which some European jewellery has descended since the seventies. Lacking such pretension, Barbara's work has kept an elegant, understated elusiveness which allows it to be examined and worn with fresh enjoyment; work which will grow with the life of the owner, presenting unexpected rhythms and turns on re-examination. The work in the first exhibition continually escaped direct reference to, or quotation from, modernist geometry, reforming and reconstructing this aesthetic, almost in terms of a considered polemic against it. The Disorienteering Flags stubbornly displaced "modernist" signs into a lighter, more playful arrangement. There is a highly controlled, personal idiosyncrasy in Barbara's work which causes the viewer to look very hard at its subversion of conventional forms and arrangements since the dialogue is so quietly presented. The display of her major pieces in that first exhibition, magnificent chains of sterling silver, brass, onyxes, haematite and acrylic showed the work as authoritative sculptures, of a calm presence, isolated in the space of the exhibition, yet, on minute examination abstracted engraved marks lightened the effect presenting a counter one-to-one speech against the public statement of the whole. Both artists, in very different ways, are exploring the secret signs and languages of either marked surfaces, or three-dimensional, linguistic and visual semantic codes.

The second exhibition contained pieces in which the frayed edges of the work and the scratch-engraving of the surfaces, with delicate gold rivets, uncertain modulations and looser, irregular geometry, made the works seem to reach out to other surfaces for completion: much more personal, and yet open, at the same time.

Sheridan and Barbara are very nearly the only experimental jewellery artists in Brisbane, hopes for another generation of such work being jeopardized by the imminent closure of the jewellery and metal-work departments in college art-departments. It is a bizarre situation for a city, which generally is making advances in the experimental visual arts, not to have a larger body of work of this type in the future. It also reflects how out-of-touch with the artistic needs and developments in Brisbane the educational institutions are, and how little interest they show in the work of the artists whom they have produced. It causes one to question the relevance of such a short-sighted educational attitude to the real art-world here or anywhere else. It is to be hoped that Sheridan's attempts to cause these institutions to reconsider their policy will be met with sympathy, and that she will not be the only experimental jeweller to come out of such training.

It was Roz MacAllan who indicated a distinction between artists working in this area and those in the established 'high' art-forms. This had struck her at the Fifth Biennial and First International Conference of Jewellers and Metalsmiths Group held at the Gold Coast from 21-24 January, 1988. Unlike the competitiveness which is a customary mark of the conventional art-world, the jewellers and metalsmiths exhibited a strong community concern for each other, exemplified by the initial apprenticeship of Sheridan with Barbara, by their continued working relationship and by the concern of both for the next generation of jewellers. This group-mindedness is the consequence of a quite different historical development from that of the arts of painting and sculpture. And this difference is reflected in the marketing of the respective products: painting and sculpture being sold through galleries, jewellery from the retail outlet of the privately-owned business of the particular artist. According to Roz MacAllan, galleries have a supportive role to play in disseminating the work of a jeweller and she has been the first to do so in Brisbane, displaying the work as aspects of the art of the sculptor, which is certainly a related characteristic of jewellery, thereby emphasizing its equality of status with the other arts, its conceptual foundation rather than its material craft nature, as well as freeing jewellers to concentrate on their own work.

Australia has been rather slow in adopting such courses of action, the Crafts Council, with its policy of equal opportunity for all in rights of display, is not in a position to promote the work of a particular artist. In the United States, specific galleries specialize in these particular arts, while in both Europe and America there is a tendency to show experimental jewellery in a boutique context, related to fashion and design. Experimental jewellery was specifically promoted in Europe at the Amsterdam gallery of Paul Derrez, Gallery Ra, in the seventies, which was foremost in encouraging characteristics which have become unquestioned in jewellery, as in the other arts, a breaking with past forms and customary functions, not least, in moving the jeweller away from the jewel towards materials associated with sculpture, painting, clothing, organic matter, through the debris of punk, to that of the building-construction industry and the banal blandness of high-tech circuitry. 

Jewellery has long since been recognised in America as a high point in the expression of the currently valid style and discourse of body-art or performance, of more import often than art in institutional galleries. Australian jewellers on the other hand have been confined to trying to establish the first post, that of jewellery as a form of sculpture. Barbara has noted that American jewellers have not forgotten the human relationship of their art, unlike European trends in the seventies which, followed more by Australians, tended to divorce their art from such overt human relationships. 

Both Barbara and Sheridan insist on such relationships which, now that jewellery has proved its ability to express every idea current in other art forms, must once more return to the forefront of such artists’ concerns. Sheridan’s deep interest in the function of jewellery in cultural history (described by Leanne Ramsay, eyeline 3) is evidence of a trend among the most recent generation of jewellery artists towards an eclectic, but intense, return to a human, indeed, individual orientation: the personal needs and interests of both the artist and the wearer. It is a move away from the austerity of non-functional, installation jewellery (albeit often containing a much under-estimated humorous element), such as the most notorious work of Otto Kunzil, Pierre Degen, David Watkins and Caroline Heron, for example, or the earlier work of the Australian Kate Durham, most of whose pieces have been highly enjoyable and easy to wear. Her work at Roz McAllan‘s gained a very popular and immediate response. Perhaps it is time to fearlessly assert the enjoyment factor of jewellery, without worrying that this will denigrate its position as ‘art’. (‘Art’ in the West implying grim asceticism and the straight-face).

Apart from highly selected performance arts, body-art is difficult for our culture to accept. We are so focused on the commodity, on that which can be stuffed into a glass-case, or a bank vault (humans being annoyingly recalcitrant to such treatment). One would think that all the conceptual and performance arts of the past twenty years, not the least of which was punk, has made it very clear that the kinetic and body arts, whether in popular, or highly intellectualized form, were those which had the most relevance to late twentieth century concerns. Is it some puritanical guilt which prevents an acceptance of this fact, which causes our state galleries to still concentrate on painting and sculpture – although such galleries are primarily circuses for a popular audience (a function which is perfectly valid and enjoyable) – which causes institutions to label studies of such forms ‘media' or 'popular cultural', rather than studies of 'art', and which causes educational institutions to throw out of their curriculum arts such as those of the jeweller as being irrelevant to the interests of their students and those of the local populace?

Of course, jewellery more than any of the arts has been plagued by a particularly close relationship with the safe-deposit box. However, this is not its natural place but is the product of capitalistic development affecting the arts since the European Renaissance. The exhibition of jewellery from Germany at the Queensland Art Gallery (January 1988), interesting and informative as it was, brought home the tragedy of the history of jewellery in the way that the exhibits were encased in glass on expensive cloths, dimly-lit or delicately flood-lit, so that they glowed like precious theatres of a dream-world of which no mortal being had any possible access.Instead of emphasizing the connection of flesh and blood with this art, the exhibition emphasized the reverse: of all the objects one might fantasize as owning, the possession of such things was the most unlikely. The exhibition encouraged both awe and sheer greed, just like the display of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.

Of all the arts, jewellery demands closest inspection through the process of touch, or at least, of close-up viewing. It is especially dependent on the tactile sense. Indeed, some traditional organic materials 'die' if they are not handled, such as amber, pearl and coral, which require the surface-oils of the skin in order to maintain their integrity. Admitting the problems of security, an exhibiting space should at some point (at the least through photographs) show the art-work on people. In a private gallery situation, or in an artist's retail outlet, or studio, it is possible to personally handle suchwork.

Both artists… are exploring the  secret signs and languages of either marked surfaces, or three-dimensional, linguistic and visual semantic codes.

Gallery Ra, in the seventies,... was foremost in encouraging characteristics which have become unquestioned in jewellery … not least, in moving the jeweller away from the jewel…

… body-art is difficult for our culture to accept. We are so focused on the commodity, on that which can be stuffed into a glass-case, or a bank vault…

Such isolation of any art-object, not only jewellery,from the human dates from the sixteenth century, when 'art' became a thing set apart from life.

In earlier history, there were no isolated objects, and there were no objects which did not work in some sense (religious icons, for example, had to answer prayers, or they were thrown into the river, as still happens in the East). The arts were not isolated from each other; from the most minute jewel to the most elaborate mosaic, everything was part of a stage-set designed for the public eye and for public participation. All art was performance, choreographed and scripted, played through in the act of kinesis. The peasant could not wear the crown, but that 'belonged' no more to the king either. Precious objects were aspects of a situation which they deciphered and narrated through their signification. It was the evolution of the investment market which ripped objects from their total environment, deritualized, desocialized, and made them items in a collection. The creation of the oil-painting dates from this time. The effects were most deleterious in the instigation of a divide between the 'conceptual arts' and the 'material' crafts'. Art became a useless and transcended material and form. Craft on the other hand always showed its connections to the matter-grounded human-body. it was 'decorative' and 'functional' as utensils, textiles, dress, jewellery, etc.

The hypocrisy of a society which lauded the abstract, while hoarding the concrete (including the oil-painting particularly), has resulted in such a variety of complex theoretical aesthetic criteria that it is not surprising that the West can justly doubt whether it has any 'art' left at all.

Though many craftspeople are content, indeed, proud to assert themselves as just that, not surprisingly, avoiding the term 'art' altogether, others have wanted to get out of the aesthetic ghetto and to reverse the historical situation.They have had to engage in a polemic which, in its early forms, always takes on an extremist character in order to awaken social interest, hence, the tortures of, for example, Gijs Bakker's "unwearable" face-jewellery, or Judy Blame's work of the eighties, such work being best-exhibited in a performance situation, as in the devastatingly "bad taste" costumery of London's Michael Clarke Dance Company.

In a calmer mood and returning to content and human meaning, Sheridan‘s helmets and daggers, both theatre and ritual, are also polemics against the shoddy inefficacy of mass-produced costume jewellery, and a reminder of what power and force the art could attain. In the second group exhibition Roz McAllan‘s inventively created environments for the works on the walls, extended their meanings and character prior to their being worn. It is one answer to the problems of display. 

There were few calls for a return to the central nature of jewellery as body-art at the JMGA conference; Bill Metcalf from the States prodding the arty and crafty complacency of jewellers themselves. How many times does an aesthetic battle have to be fought and won in this society before the general issues are recognised and remembered?