Township 13 (Aerial Detail)

Artist Statement:
I am drawn to the narrative potential of jewellery to explore ideas and issues around social and cultural experience, loss, and our relationship to landscape. Jewellery is in some ways so common it is easy to overlook what a potent signifier it is, expressing our desires, evoking that which no longer exists, and signalling our affiliations with others. It is at once the most public and private of art forms. Township 13, for which I received a Manitoba Arts Council creation grant, reimagines a portion of an air photograph of Garson, Manitoba in sterling silver and other materials. The area includes the small farm my grandparents worked when they emigrated as impoverished farmers from Poland in 1903. The piece is a 6” by 6” “map” housed in a custom-made box. It is also sixteen wearable jewellery pieces.

Air photographs, taken at a distance and with the added layer of cloud cover, render the landscape as series of obscured shapes. Although it was important to me to pinpoint where my grandparent’s farm once existed (the small lapis lazuli square) I wanted to present a broader picture of the collision of geology and human intervention, some obvious, some concealed or buried. Like a photograph, the Township 13 map is an abstraction of the thing itself told from one perspective.