Benjamin Lignel from Bethel, Metalsmith Magazine, attempts to answer this question...
http://www.klimt02.net/forum/index.php?item_id=7624
an excerpt from the article:
'Contemporary Jewellery is a type of practice - understood as the contemporary offspring of a craft-based design activity that finds its origin in medieval workshops. Such a definition stresses contemporary jewellery’s historical past, and finds antecedents in the British and American Arts & Crafts movements, the renewed late XIXth century interest in manual skills (as a last stand against industrialisation), and the emergence of radical jewellery movements in the 60s: it underlines the notions of individuality, craftsmanship, and its troubled relationship to the production mainstream; or a type of object: poised between high-street jewellery and art (the former’s glorified other, the latter’s poor relative), we know what it’s not (‘just’ manufactured artefacts for wearing), and what it wants to be (the expression of individual talent that reflects on, and sometimes influences, contemporary culture), much less what it is.'
image credits:Benjamin Lignel
Ring: Happy family NHS 2002
Rubber, gauze, ink
Set of two adhesive rings, edition of 300
Photograph by Joel Degen (London)
