Interviews

New Zealand jeweler Craig McIntosh is breaking all the stone-carving rules by turning the method around from a reductive process to an additive one. He works in a land where stone carving is a strong tradition, so this could be upsetting. His new show at The National in Christchurch gives us an idea of what this means.

Susan Cummins: You are a carver of stone and a maker of small objects and jewelry, similar to the Japanese craftsman who makes netsuke. What is your connection to that, and how did you get here?

Craig McIntosh: I was introduced to netsuke in the late 90s. I produced and exhibited a small amount of netsuke alongside making jewelry ’til about 2004. If you’re interested in carving, there is so much that can be learned from looking into netsuke—in fact, I don’t think I would make the jewelry I make now, or understand as much about working on a small scale, if I hadn’t explored netsuke.

But it became problematic. The more I became involved with making jewelry, and considering jewelry and its relationship to identity—particularly here in Aotearoa, New Zealand—the less appropriate it felt to be making something from somebody else’s culture. So I stopped, and have been focusing on making jewelry since. I think it has been one of the most rewarding decisions I have ever made.

Ann Culy has a thing for rings. Using ancient techniques for making them, she is showing a variety of rings at the Avid Gallery in New Zealand. Avid has recently joined the galleries who support Art Jewelry Forum. We  welcome their addition, which adds to the texture and variety of the artists we interview.

Susan Cummins: Were you born and raised in New Zealand?

Ann Culy: Yes, in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

Can you tell the story of how you became a jeweler?

Ann Culy: I discovered working with metal at art school, in the printmaking studio and in the sculpture department, where I worked on a small scale using lost-wax casting in bronze. The combination of melting, pouring, and manipulation of metal has been a constant joy and led me directly to jewelry making, where I can fuse all those skills together.

Ted Noten … well, what can you say? He is a phenomenon in this small world of art jewelry. He has become an atelier, not a lone maker; he has developed see-through purses and bags, not just jewelry; he has made videos; he designed the AJF pin in 2012; he cut up a luxury car and made the pieces into brooches; he has written a manifesto; and so much more. This show at Putti Gallery is a retrospective of 25 years of his work. We had to take the opportunity to interview him.

Susan Cummins: You said, “Your story can only get through to people if you rob them of their prejudices about jewellery.” How do you do that?

Ted Noten: I play with greed and seduce by aesthetics, using archetypes that people can recognize and loads of humor. These elements make my work possible to enter and then there are more layers of comments, criticisms, condensations of meanings. All this without being moralistic! But through absurdist mirroring.

Daniel Kruger, who is a professor at the University for Art and Design in Halle, Germany, is currently having an exhibition at Sienna Patti, among many other things. For one, he has just produced a beautiful monograph published by Arnoldsche, and for another he has accompanying shows at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Leipzig, Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim, Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus in Hanau, and the Stedelijk Museum ’s-Hertogenbosch. This series of exhibitions and the book took many years of planning and are a huge accomplishment. Daniel Kruger is everywhere.

Susan Cummins: Daniel, you are having quite a moment right now, with a new book, Daniel Kruger: Between Nature and Artifice, Jewellery 1974–2014, and a series of four museum shows, plus of course this exhibition with Sienna Gallery. How long have you been planning these events and how did the plans develop?

Daniel Kruger: The planning started a long time ago because the exhibitions and book were originally scheduled for 2010. I had approached Cornelie Holzach of the Schmuckmuseum in Pforzheim about doing an exhibition there. She agreed, and this was a particular honor as I had already had an exhibition there in 1984 and this would be my second show at this museum. After that I asked Yvonne Joris of the Stedelijk Museum s’-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands (she died last year) if she would give the exhibition a second venue. There too I had had solo exhibitions in the past initiated by Yvonne in the two municipal museums preceding the present Stedelijk Museum in s’Hertogenbosch: 1981 at the Dienst Beeldende Kunst, De Moriaan and 1994 at the Museum het Kruithuis “Five Stones and a Small Feint”. The project grew with the Goldschmiedehaus in Hanau to where my exhibition of 1984 in Pforzheim had followed from Pforzheim and the Grassi Museum in Leipzig that now will be the initiator of this series of exhibitions. Between one thing and another, the shows were postponed and the order of the exhibitions changed around. This gave me a lot of time and leisure to do the planning.