The Danish jewellery artists participating in the 8. Alatyr, each contribute with works that reflect the strong influence that nature still has on Danish design. Just like with amber, ”Freja’s tears”, “The gold of the North” – a material that is closely linked to Danish identity. It continues to inspire and motivate jewellery art of the highest quality.
With her neckpiece ”Ancient Flowers”, Mette Saabye fantasizes about what the flowers looked like when resin dripped from the ancient trees.
How big were they, was their scent sweet or poignant? The flowers have long since wilted and become a part of the soil, or have they? We sometimes find plant and animal elements when processing amber. Encapsulated air pockets break, and as we cut and polish the material, we inhale the past. The scent of amber forms an immediate connection between the past and the present. These reflections on an abstract past have been materialised into an actual piece of jewellery and the past emerges.
Perhaps these flowers grew in the same landscapes that Jytte Løppenthin depicts in her three brooches: “On land at sea and in the air” 1-3.
These brooches possess a material narrative, which stimulate our imagination. Landscapes in amber refer to a time long, long ago. A herd of creatures meet, play and longingly search for each other in former nature. The golden colour of amber draws our imagination in the direction of a warm and sunny summer day. Lovely warm memories that we recognise from our own lives. The jewellery captures fleeting moments. Jytte allows us to have a quick look at the micro-cosmos in the macro-cosmos. A glance through a microscope, a pair of binoculars, with which one can look at the past, when the insects and the plants in the amber were still full of life.
Christine Bukkehave also creates stories about the past and present with her jewellery. Here, the theme is the contrast between nature and culture, the living baroque and stylised man-made lines and shapes. The motifs in “Flora Forrest” & “Quiet Forrest” reveal themselves as ’gifts’ from the amber. A dialogue between artist and material takes place during the process of working with amber. A raw piece of amber is cut into slices and the motif appears, like a tale from the past. Christine juxtapositions the hazy and dreamlike images of the ancient, dark golden forest with her stringent, modern interpretation of the forest. The polished surfaces of the silver appear tangible and clear.
The focal point for both Marie Rimmen and Trine Trier is the reproduction of cultivated nature. The abstract geometric motifs in Marie Rimmen’s brooches Fields of Amber 1 & 2, are reminiscent of sections of cornfields, as we see them from high up in an airplane, looking down on the cultivated agriculture just below us. Large square fields in varying golden shades that indicate whether they are rye, barley, oats or wheat.
We turn our attention from the fields to Trine Trier’s delicate “Amber flowerbed”, which consists of 10 dainty rings. An ”Orto botanico”, a small selection of the forgotten flower species, one for each finger, where they tremble slightly with every movement. We sense how the fragile and exposed flowers swayed in the wind on the open meadows. We can pick and carefully study each little flower and decorate ourselves with them.
Tina Richter Petersen is the only participant who has brought the past and the future together, in a combination of materials and techniques. In the neckpiece, “In between flowers”, the nectar flows out of the 3D printed nylon flowers, as golden amber beads in a circuit, where the motif is repeated, with small variations.
With the brooches, “Pale sunflower” & “Sunflower”, Tina Richter Petersen also plays with the contrasts between the natural and the man-made. The true-to-nature synthetic petals encircle the centre of the flowers, in a partially natural material, and together create a whole. We can no longer rely on nature being natural; it is full of genetically manipulated variations of the plants of the past.
Mette Saabye
THE AMBER MUSEUM
