Jivan Asfalck

These two 19th Century rolled gold brooches have hidden compartments in the back to hold memento mori, photographs, hair of loved ones, or other materials of remembrance.

The gold brooch is as found, the other I blackened out on the front, and inserted a vibrant orange casting of flowers from another 19th Century piece of jewellery in the back, playing with contrasts in materials, colours, and emotional investments.

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Jivan Astfalck - Artist Statement

I make… mostly by hand.

Some of my objects are wearable, and others are tools of reference, tools for seeing and seeing better. These objects resonate with intimacy and passionate investment; they are signified by a continuous dynamic of rediscovery, recycling of meaning and appropriation. It is body adornment that exists in stark contrast to the overwhelming standardisation generated by mechanised commodity culture. In this context, my use of the assemblage as an art form in jewellery allows me to play with layered metaphors and create artistic representations with multi-layered meanings. The viewer can become an active part and co-creator of the meaning of the work - interpreting the objects, independent of my intentions, and by doing so adding to the layers of meaning and narrative. The objects are sites of memory and fiction, of reflection, visible traces that articulate and represent connections with the invisible and imagined in a complex web of relationships. They are romantic! The ambiguous nature of the notion of the author, the narrative incompleteness of life with the entanglement of histories, those into which we are born and those, which we invent for ourselves, it all adds to how we apply fiction to life. I play with metaphorical symbolisation, and I am interested in jewellery pieces that map out the demarcation lines, where the body meets world, a place, or idea of a place, where narratives are invested in objects to negotiate that gap, complexity, confusion, or conflict. Jewellery is mostly seen and understood as an embellishment to the body as subject and object - my work seeks to rectify this by examining the dialogical relationship between the body, jewellery, and its representation in visual culture, and so questioning whether jewellery is solely about making the body beautiful.