And the Winner is - SA Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition 2018

The Winner

SA Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition 2018

Joani Groenewald

Seven Deadly Seductions

Joani Groenewald’s work takes a satirical stance against popular-culture and consumer culture as experienced form within a South African context. 

In her latest series of works entitled The Seven Deadly Seductions, Groenewald is inspired by the religious concept of the seven deadly sins. The series humorously challenges the seductiveness of unethical behaviour, particularly within the framework of the current South African political environment. The pieces are personal interpretations and abstractions of form, material and colour. That take a satirical stance against popular culture and the consumer oriented lifestyle that so many South Africans have become accustom to. They portray negative character traits as jewels, which confront the meaning of status symbols. The work challenges perceptions through the influential symbolic power of jewellery, specifically as a means to communicate identity and social status.

Title: Envy (Title Image- above)

Materials: Oxidized Silver, Glass, Copper, Enamel, Plastic, Synthetic Coral, Cotton

Technique: Silversmithing, enameling, piercing, lamp work glass and mouldmaking techniques.

Title: Hopelessly Hopeful - three-part series

Materials: Brass, Glass, Copper, Enamel, Plastic, Cotton

Technique: Silversmithing, enameling, piercing, lamp work glass and mould making techniques

Title: Sloth

Materials: Silver, glass, synthetic turquoise, enamel

Technique: Silversmithing, enameling, piercing, lamp work glass and mould making techniques

About Art Jewellery

Groenewald views contemporary jewellery as medium through which one can critically reflect upon one’s social and political environment. Her research and art interests are based on memory and narrative studies; questioning the stability of them, whilst also challenging the traditional function of jewellery specifically in relation to a South African context. She continues to make art that feeds into and from these research interests.

About Joani Groenewald

Groenewald is a lecturer in the Visual Arts Department, as well as a jewellery designer, goldsmith and artist. She sees her technical grounding, as a medium that allows her to create conceptual art. She graduated with a Ba degree in Visual Art ( with a focus on Creative Jewellery- and Metal Design) from Stellenbosch University in 2009 where she later enrolled in the graduate training programme in 2010. During this time she worked as an goldsmith apprentice and eventually qualified as a goldsmith in 2011. In March 2015 she successfully completed her MA degree in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University with distinctions. She was advent participatent of numerous, national and international contemporary jewellery exhibitions spaning her entire career in the jewellery industry.

The Runner-up

SA Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition 2018

Mariambibi Khan

Interlacing Identities.

Mariambibi Khan chose to investigate gendered and feminine identities and its associations to metallic and lace inspired jewellery. Her inspiration is derived from the hydrangea in both its live and skeletal decayed form. This represented a complex contrast and translation of form, shape and function. She has incorporated textile technique of bobbin lace in jewellery. This allowed her to construct metallic lace pieces which embodies bobbin lace in contemporary jewellery practices. She also found that although a more geometric structure of the lace is used it draws attention to feminine and gendered stereotypes associated with design processes. Her related research provides a description of the use of alternative material of lace and lace jewellery, and explores the associated gendered assumptions. This is illustrated in the delicate lines, floral patterns, and soft, organic design motifs which are considered to be more accepted for the adornment of women. However, her main focus was to analyze whether the material and context used played an important role in feminine inspired designs of lace jewellery.

Title: Bobbin Lace: Interlacing Identities.

Materials: Fine Silver, Sterling Silver & Gold Plating.

Technique: Bobbin Lace.

About Mariambibi Khan

Ms Khan was recently appointed jewellery lecturer in Metal Art and Design in the Department of Visual Art at the University  Stellenbosch.

In 2015 she graduated with a Ba Hons in Jewellery Design and Manufacture from the University of Johannesburg (Cum Laude). She has comprehensive knowledge of Jewellery Design and manufacturing skills, obtained from working in the industry - amongst others, Elegance Jewellers.

Special Mention

SA Contemporary Jewellery Awards Exhibition 2018

Nora Kovats

Poeletjie

Kovats defines herself as an ‘identity-hopper’, due to her being South-African and European. She is interested in the way narrative constructs human identities particularly their overlaps and boundaries. Identities are infinitely complex and fragmented compositions, often paradoxical, fragile and fluid yet so powerfully definitive. Something she attempt to represent visually in the form of complicated, multi-layered structures in her jewellery and drawings.

With this particular piece, titled ‘Poeletjie’(Afrikaans for puddle or small pool)  she attempted to investigate her own fascination with water and its elusiveness. She describes water as “having the paradoxical characteristic of being immensely powerful (both as a force of nature and in its importance for humanity’s survival) yet also incredibly fragile, easily polluted and its systems tilted off-balance. It is mysterious, difficult to quantify. Water harbours some of our most profound fears in its darkest unexplored depths, and it is sheer gushing life and vibrancy. It carves away ancient stone with patient drops – literally shaping the landscapes that form our human stories, our identities.” 

She is drawn to enameling as a technique because of its uniqueness and its abbility to create spontaneity, dictated by the firing process. In this way she can achieve a feeling of fragility, fresh colour and a delicate, spattered texture that visually embodies the emotions water elicits for her.

Her thoughts were circling around different water themes for some time, sparked by news of the severe water crisis currently threatening Cape Town, her hometown, and the contrasting wastage she experience in Berlin, where dishes are washed under a running tap. She contemplates the links between water and human identities, how we are affected by floods, rain, drought, how we identify as river-people or sea-people or desert people. Water in itself can be seen as a metaphor for human identities with its perfectly contradictory embodiment of fragility and monumentality: water is an immensely powerful force of nature, yet so easily polluted and vulnerable. And like within herself in her existence - a dance between two countries, two cities - water succeeds in having multiple identities at the same time.

Title: Poeletjie (Puddle)

Jewellery Piece: Brooch and Pendant (dual function)

Materials: Enamel. Copper, sterling silver, steel pin, amethyst, citrine

Technique: Smithing, enameling, hand-sawing

About Nora Kovats

Kovats graduated with a BA and MA Degree in Jewellery Design from the Stellenbosch University. She was the overall winner of the 2013 Thuthuka Jewellery & Product Development Programme Competition. She has participated in a number of International Jewellery competitions including the Berlin State Prize Competition for Applied Arts in Germany.