Author: Ruby Jewel

‘In Dialogue’ – Tuesday afternoon lecture series with Silvana Mc Nulty (alum 2019) in conversation with Irma Földényi and Saskia Van der Gucht

Image by Silvana Mc Nulty


Through forty images, Silvana Mc Nulty will share the evolution of her practice, her process and her position as an artist in the art world. She works mainly with textile technics, such as crochet, that she mingles with different objects. Each piece she creates is often of a small scale, allowing her to work wherever she is and offering her flexibility and autonomy. It is through accumulation and association that the scale changes adapting to the exhibition space. Questions of installation are therefore inherent to her work.

Bio: Silvana Mc Nulty (born in 1995, lives and works in Paris) is a French artist. Her practice lies at the intersection of sculpture, object, jewellery and textile. She places raw material at the center of her research. Through her practice of weaving and patchwork, organic and artificial confront and mingle. She creates objects that are both flexible and unstable whose hybrid status rises confusion. Her work has been exhibited at In Extenso (Clermont-Ferrand), Le Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers), Treize (Paris) and the Florence Loewy gallery (Paris), which represents her.
https://www.silvanamcnulty.com/


Irma Földényi and Saskia Van der Gucht will present Sandscapes (2023). They will give an introduction on their practices and their collaboration in artistic research where they look at the topic of ecology through precious mined materials.

Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles. After water it is the most utilized natural resource on earth. It is present in every structure, road, window, and screen we use daily. As abundant as it seems, it is predicted to become scarce due to overconsumption by industrial use.

‘Sandscapes’ was an exhibition at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp, Belgium by Saskia Van der Gucht, Irma Földényi, Eline de Clercq and Virág Szálas-Motesiczky. It presented a case study on sand, its finitude and preciousness through four perspectives.

This collaborative artistic research was a result of ‘an invitation to think with us’ – from Irma and Saskia to Virág and Eline – to test their research around the central question: How would you translate finitude through your practice?

Their fieldwork spanned across contexts of an archeological site, a construction project, hardware stores and a gem laboratory, looking at ways of connecting specific locations, theory readings, material samples and experiments.  The presentation shared physical outcomes of the four participants, curated over scale, referring to the gradualness between a piece of land and a grain of sand.

Sandscapes, 2023


Bio: Saskia Van der Gucht (BE) is a visual artist, researcher and teacher based in Antwerp. Her work deals with the complexities and ecologies of emotional and economic value of materials and the feeling of home.
Through a combination of references to jewellery and architecture, she translates these subjects into objects, small installations, photography and drawing.

In 2014 she obtained an MA in Jewellery Design at Sint Lucas Antwerp. Currently she is enrolled in the Advanced Master program on research in Art & Design in a socio-political context.
Since 2019 she has been teaching the theory course ‘Art & design in the anthropocene’ together with Irma Földényi. From 2017 to 2022 she was a teacher at the jewellery department, both at Sint Lucas Antwerp.
https://www.saskiavandergucht.be/

Bio: In her practice Irma Földényi (HU/NL) brings together outcomes from her ongoing, often collaborative research into the sourcing and valuing of materials, and the possible roles of the jeweller within contemporary material discourse. It seems important to try to understand where and how materials enter our lives and to question the construction of their value, but complex supply chains and industrial processing often obscure any connection to a material’s origin. By giving form to context, she aims to reveal nuanced stories from our geological era. The outcomes are designed not to draw attention to themselves as primarily precious jewellery objects but to communicate their connections to broader fields — whether historical, geographical, ecological or otherwise.
https://studio-if.nl/studio/

Irma has been teaching at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Gerrit Rietveld Academy Jewellery – Linking Bodies and Sint Lucas Antwerpen Jewellery Department. She is currently developing her PhD ‘Voices of Materials’ at Sint Lucas Antwerpen & University of Antwerpen, and is a board member of the Francoise van den Bosch Foundation, which aims to stimulate and promote contemporary jewellery.


We look forward to welcome Irma, Saskia and Silvana!

Tuesday 21.5.2024
14:30-17:00
FedLev Auditorium
Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Fred. Roeskestraat 96
1076 ED Amsterdam

For more information and bio’s please visit our website: www.jewellerydepartment.nl

Hope to see you next Tuesday, Jewellery – Linking Bodies

Tuesday afternoon lecture – Dominik Cunningham – stream link available!

Dear students, alumni, friends, and colleagues of the Jewellery – Linking Bodies department,

After a regenerative May break, we are back with our next Tuesday afternoon lecture, this time with Dominik Cunningham.
Dominik is currently an Artist in Residence at the Francoise van den Bosch foundation , and we are happy to collaborate yet again, inviting their resident to share their practice with our community.

Dominik will give a lecture titled: Making present an absence: analyzing death through a personal queer perspective, about this lecture he writes:

In this lecture I would like to contextualize the journey of exploration present in my new body of work – showcasing the multiple vantage points from which I have considered the point, in which my personal ideas of death and queerness inform each other. Queerness and my personal ideas on death seem to exemplify my sense of existential self. My material experience and understanding of the world are fundamentally tied to the connection I have to my queerness and my relationship with my own mortality.

I recalled moments in my life, such as the first family holiday after my mother’s death in which I sat on a beach and read the teachings of the Buddha. That moment and a subsequent visit to a Buddhist temple were seminal in my imagining of death. It is moments such as this that have been coupled with research into David Wojnarowicz’s work, particularly his memoir of disintegration “Close to the Knives”, which allows for me to synthesize my work into an assemblage of considered objects. Imbuing within them my personal perspective, which hopefully aligns itself to others of similar thought. Circumstance has been a guiding force, in relation to reference points as well as the materiality of the pieces – which is why I have intentionally allowed myself to be guided by my intuition in the process of creating this work. The work is fundamentally the representation of a journey that has taken many years to cultivate.

Bio:
Dominik Cunningham (1998) is currently based in San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A. He received his BA in Jewelry Design from Central Saint Martins in London, U.K. He has won a series of awards during his time at Central Saint Martins including the Theo Fennell Award for Best Design(2022), the Swarovski Foundation Scholarship(2022), and the Marzee Graduate Prize(2022). In 2023 he exhibited work at Munich Jewelry Week with Vitsœ. A piece from his graduate collection is held in the Marzee permanent Collection. Recently he has finished his collaboration with Current Obsession in their talent accelerator program GemZ. This collaboration culminated in an exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. This summer he will be creating a new body of work at the Francoise van den Bosch Foundation Artist Residency. He is also working on a solo exhibition as well as several other group exhibitions for the upcoming year.

We look forward to welcome Dominik Cunningham
Tuesday 14.5.2024
14:30-16:00
FedLev Auditorium
Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Fred. Roeskestraat 961076 ED Amsterdam

We look forward to having you with us next Tuesday, if you can not make it, you can join online via https://stream.rietveldacademie.nl/ .

Warm wishes,
Jewellery- Linking Bodies