Search results for ""Author Damian Skinner""

For more than four decades, jewellery artist and educator Laurie Hall has been making stories the subject of her work. Her playful, often whimsical jewellery made with found objects is about the places she lives, the landscapes that fill her imagination, her family history, and her ideas of what it is to be an American. As a jeweller, Hall never plays it safe, preferring to fly by the seat of her pants and push her skills and technical knowledge. Her work is part of numerous private and public collections including The Museum of Art and Design in NYC, The Tacoma Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is a product of the jewellery histories that make the Pacific Northwest unique within the larger story of American contemporary jewellery. Featuring 58 images of Hall’s jewellery spanning the period from 1974 to 2019, this book explores why she is an important maker whose practice deserves to be more widely known.

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Since the late 1980s, American jeweller Keith Lewis (*1959) has been consistently tackling issues of Queer identity and politics in his figurative and narrative jewellery, including a groundbreaking series of memorial jewels addressing the impact of the AIDS crisis on himself and his community. Often witty, sometimes shocking, frequently erotic, and surprisingly moving, his jewellery is an act of remembering and witnessing, and a joyous assertion that desire and pleasure, wonderful ends in themselves, can collapse historical distance and connect the past and the present. Written by Damian Skinner and featuring four of Lewis’s artist talks documenting key preoccupations and series, this monograph surveys a bold, provocative, and ambitious body of work that deserves to be widely known.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, a generation of young Americans rejected the promise of prosperity and the suburban dream embraced by their parents. Furious about the war in Vietnam, fighting for civil rights at home, and eagerly exploring the effects of psychedelic drugs, the delights of free love, and the mystical teachings of eastern religions, thousands followed the advice to "turn on, tune in, drop out," bringing about a counterculture in the process. For many American jewellers, these events and values found their way into the studio, as well as affecting how they lived, worked, and loved. Jewellers, like other studio craftspeople, rode the wave of popularity for the hand-made and authentic that was at the heart of the counterculture. In Flux is the story of how their jewellery contributed to the raucous, contradictory, and enthusiastic clamour for a new kind of society that made the 1960s and 1970s so extraordinary.

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A major new history of craft that spans three centuries of making and thinking in Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Moana (Pacific). Paying attention to Pakeha (European New Zealanders), Maori, and island nations of the wider Moana, and old and new migrant makers and their works, this book is a history of craft understood as an idea that shifts and changes over time. At the heart of this book lie the relationships between Pakeha, Maori and wider Moana artistic practices that, at different times and for different reasons, have been described by the term craft. It tells the previously untold story of craft in Aotearoa New Zealand, so that the connections, as well as the differences and tensions, can be identified and explored. This book proposes a new idea of craft--one that acknowledges Pakeha, Maori and wider Moana histories of making, as well as diverse community perspectives towards objects and their uses and meanings.

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