”Precious metal designer Mette Saabye introduces a documentary aspect in her jewellery making. She does it in such a way that classical jewellery values, such as the symbolic function of the amulet, are woven into a web of complex and discarded, private observations. With memories bordering on the nostalgic, the jewellery puts us in touch with a time gone by. With great aesthetic precision, life is presented in snapshots. Mette’s almost ethnographic and characteristic work has been carried out in a poetic and tender way.”
Text by Louise Mazanti
To Mette Saabye (b. 1969) craft is ”the bike she rides”. Trained as a goldsmith, her tools are the saw, the flexshaft and the pliers. She knows her material and has full control of the design process – but nevertheless, she chooses the unpredictable.
So to say she rides the bike, has set the direction but does not know the final goal.
In the current series of jewellery “A Boat Is a Boat…Is a Boat a Boat?” 23 pieces of jewellery represent the identity of 23 different people. Each person has been decisive for the design of one piece. Asked to describe in writing a personal association, memory or experience with a boat, and also to document the type of boat in sketches or pictures, the respondents have conveyed Mette Saabye with material of a deeply personal content. Based on this material she has produced a piece of jewellery for each person. The result is the representation of 23 different conceptions of the same physical thing; a boat. As the title suggests, a boat is a boat; a specific type of object in the world of physical things. But as it is added, the boat is never the same. Memories, associations, longings and personal interpretations create an almost nostalgic atmosphere that suddenly invests the anonymous designation ‘boat’ with a striking authenticity.
The concern of Mette Saabye is to point at this common human condition of navigating between anonymous diversity and individually experienced authenticity. She points to the fact that the world is perceived according to the personal and social history of each individual, although we agree on the same linguistic constructions. Language potentially contains a personal level of profundity.
In this project everybody can be a co-creator. The artistic process can no longer be ascribed solely to the artist, but is created in the interplay between the frame set up by the artist and the social body. Much of the meaning of the work lies in the recognition of this dual production of meaning.
Thus, Mette Saabye represents a conceptual practice that employs the aesthetic expression only as a point of departure for a more reflective and social agenda. This practice refers rather to contemporary visual art strategies than to traditional Danish crafts, whose social agenda has been determined by the wish to provide people with aesthetic objects. However, there is one crucial difference between visual art and conceptual craft. As the reflection on the ‘boat’ suggests, it is material culture, the relation between people and things, authenticity and the anchoring in physical objects that are at focus. Mette Saabye never looses neither aesthetic sensibility nor the social object of sight. She represents a practice in change that, by being reflective, aesthetic and object-based, has all the power to claim attention.
Photographer Dorte Krogh
