As far as I know I wrote about my experiences in life nearly every day. When I started making jewellery I promised myself not to write about art or jewellery, but to do something else with my hands: just making jewellery myself. But I couldn’t keep the promise. This exhibition changed my mind and also changed my work.
At the time I started studying jewellery design I didn’t write about art for a long period. Not because I did’nt want to, but because I didn’t have time for it, and most of all because I promised myself that I was not going to write about art but to make pieces myself. The years before I wrote lots of books about poetry, art and culture. Fom 1999 till 2009 I wrote more than 400 pages a year for a series of teacher’s and school books published in Belgium by Wolters-Plantyn. Why do I tell this? There was one particular exhibition that changed my mind. It was the first impressive exhibition that really influenced my own work as a jewellery maker: Lin Cheung , Laura Potter and Manuel Vilhena at Marzee in the Netherlands. I always kept the words I wrote after visiting the exhibition as a kind of jewellery treasure.
Lin Cheung
This work seames so natural, so easy, so ordinary, so daily. But after a second, a third and a fourth look, always again I noticed that the pieces all have different layers with different backgrounds. She starts using ideas and things out of daily life, but gives them an extraordinary communication between the object and the person owning the object or wearing the piece.
The work of Lyn Cheung always asks new questions about the relationship between life and jewellery, about communication between life and jewellery, or about the emotional value for the owner of the piece and the artist. With me this jewellery communicated not only by touching me emotionally, but also by making me write about the meaning of jewellery.
I don’t know if there exists a word to indicate this kind of communication, but the work of Lin Cheung made me write the first words of a blog that didn’t exist at the time of the communication.