COUP de COEUR ! Sayumi YOKOUCHI et ses « petits mondes »

Sayumi Yokouchi was born in Tokyo, Japan and now lives in Brooklyn, New York where she maintains her studio. Sayumi began her studies in jewelry at Cabrillo college in Santa Cruz, California. She received her MFA with honors from SUNY New Paltz, and BFA from California College of The Arts. She has participated in many galleries and museum exhibitions nationally and internationally. She has taught and lectured as visiting artists at many places, currently teaches at the 92nd street Y in New York city. (Sienna gallery)

« My jewelry is a place of discovery; a reflection of the world in which I inhabit and my material of choices are response to my daily experiences and common belongings in the community. I’m curious about the way we adapt common objects in the domestic environment and how the objects become precious and memorable in our life experiences. I am fascinated by inherent transformative qualities of seemingly banal and common place objects, and isolating the moment when materials progress from their original form into something more beautiful and precious.« 

Sayumi Yokouchi  – « There is little to choose between them #2″ Rings  – « There is little to choose between them #1″ Ring  — « There is little to choose between them #1″ Ring

Sayumi Yokouchi – « Hydrangea » Necklace  -  « Fruity Pebbles Necklace #1″

Sayumi Yokouchi- Bee Hive Brooch  — Fiori Brooch

Sayumi Yokouchi - Necklace (detail)

Sayumi Yokouchi- Kyohanabi Brooch

« I find beauty in industrial materials, and posses a fascination for using them when making a piece of jewelry. Being born and raised in the big city of Tokyo Japan, and now living in New York City, I’ve come to see urban life as a kind of landscape resembling an enormous field of flowers where the natural and unnatural grow and live together. New buildings appear in the place of old ones and people continually come and go, much like new flowers coming into bloom season after season.
New life becomes old quickly in the urban environment. Old to new, new to old — echoed everywhere from computer systems, to houses, mone ìy, fashion trends and even personal relationships; all of which perpetuate the continuous and vast urban cycle.
In this respect, I see my jewelry as an empty field, wherein I plant my own kind of flowers and create my own form of urban nature within the field. My flowers are blooming one by one, always metaphorically contrasting the synthetic (urban) and precious (country). My material choices are my responses to the world I inhabit, and ornamentation is a result of my purest desire.
My approach to work is an endless experimentation with materials and process. I search for a boundary-free territory within the field of jewelry making, and thus, I find a great deal of pleasure when I find myself deeply connected to my chosen materials.« 

Sayumi Yokouchi – brooch (The Plastic show)

Sayumi Yokouchi – « White Dish »  (The Plastic show)

Sayumi Yokouchi – « Orange Dish »  (The Plastic show)

Sayumi Yokouchi « Ptelea Trifoliata » Brooches

Sayumi Yokouchi – Urban Topographia Brooch #5 – silver, palladium white gold, colored wire, nylon thread, paint

Sayumi Yokouchi – Bloom Brooch 1 – silver, 14kt gold, plastic bottle caps, silk thread

 

Sayumi Yokouchi – Brooch, Lichen Familia Series (& detail)

COUP de COEUR ! Yoko SHIMIZU – bijoux de papier

Yoko Shimizu : encore une ancienne élève de l’école ALCHIMIA !!

C’est ce que je lui disais : je ne sais pas si tous les meilleurs viennent se former à Alchimia, ou c’est c’est Alchimia qui forme les futurs « meilleurs », mais quelle « malle aux trésors » !!!!!!!!!!

délicatesse des coloris, des matériaux …. le Japon tel qu’on se l’imagine, doux, tranquille, et tout en délicatesse …

Yoko Shimizu – necklace  n.71 – resin, paper, silver

Yoko Shimizu - bracelet n.70  resin, paper, nylon

Yoko Shimizu - necklace n.390 – resin, paper, silk, silver

Yoko Shimizu - necklace – resin, paper, silk

Yoko Shimizu - necklace  n.364  resin, paper, silver

 

COUP de … ROUGE – Ritsuko OGURA – bijoux de papier

« COUP de ROUGE » …. mais je n’ai pu résister au reste !!!

« Ritsuko Ogura uses cardboard in her jewellery giving new life to a material that is normally used for packaging and then discarded after use. She is attracted to the idea that cardboard does not catch people’s attention as a material in itself, as opposed to Japanese paper that is inherently beautiful, so she is able to give this poor material dignity by transforming it into sculptures for the body. She exploits the difficulty in cutting cardboard to her advantage, using this drawback to create new modes of expression. The finished pieces resemble delicate lace-like structures, with the inclusion of colour in some parts, or simply left the natural brown colour of the original cardboard used. Ogura has in time mastered this humble material and skilfully creates voluminous pieces to be worn or simply admired. » (Alternatives gallery)

brooch- Cardboard, silver, acrylic paint -  2006 

Burnt cardboard, acrylic paint- bracelet 2007

bracelet- Cardboard, silver, acrylic paint -  2006

brooch- Cardboard, silver, acrylic paint -  2006 (and back – 11cm)

brooch- Cardboard, silver, acrylic paint -  2007 ( 13,5cm)

brooch- Cardboard, silver -  2007

bracelet -cardboard, silver - 2007

 

bracelet- Cardboard, silver, acrylic paint -  2007

HOMMAGE – Goodbye Mari FUNAKI

Mari Funaki a quitté le monde du bijou le 13 mai dernier. Hommage à un sculpteur de bijoux.

« Mari Funaki laisse ce putain de monde un peu plus beau au travers de la délicatesse tendue de ses bijoux et leur irréductible poésie » (Christophe Burger)

 

 » My main interest is to explore form and space, constructing the forms and details between the space with flat plain surfaces of metal. Blackened mild steel creates shadow and mystery. I work with evocative forms based on nature and the everyday environment. They might remind you of something familiar or something from your memory. I like to make my forms stir people’s emotions or imagination. » (Mari Funaki)

Mari Funaki - ‘Space between’ 2005-06 – mild steel bracelet

Mari Funaki - ‘Space between’ 2005-06  – brooches

« Mari was born in Matsue, Japan and arrived in Australia in 1979. After completing studies in painting and gold & silversmithing at RMIT University, she opened Gallery Funaki in 1995 to promote national and international contemporary jewellery. Mari works as Director of Gallery Funaki whilst maintaining an active career as a contemporary jeweller and maker of sculptural mild steel vessels.
There is a strong personal visual language in Mari’s work – her jewellery and objects express how she sees the world around her. She works very intuitively, using mild steel and gold to make brooches, bracelets, rings and objects, each piece imbued with a sense mystery and surprise. Her work starts with a sketch, then the details of the form are developed through the making process. She is particularly interested in the interplay between negative and positive volume and spaces, the juxtaposition between inside and outside. »

Mari Funaki - ‘Space between’  bracelet

« SPACE BETWEEN » :  » ‘Black. Sharp, shifting contours. Familiar and alien. Confident, expressive and agile, it is easy to take the existence of these works for granted – and it is hard enough to trace in one’s mind the physical evolution back through heat colouring, sandblasting, soldering, assembling and cutting, to unremarkable, thin sheets of mild steel – let alone comprehend their conception and resolution.
They inhabit space in a way that is difficult to describe – the edge between each object and the space that encloses it is shockingly sudden.
How can something human-made be so insanely artificial and natural at the same time? It must be no accident that I described them as articulate – ambiguous and wide ranging in the breadth of associations and allusions, they can tell you everything and nothing at the same time.’  » (Sally Marsland, 2006)

Mari Funaki - ‘Space between’  bracelets – heat-coloured mild steel

bracelets – oxidized mild steel

 

Space Between – rings 2006 / white gold

Notes from a Conversation with Mari Funaki, July 2006

« Mari Funaki’s initial response comes from the environment – the response is part random, part constructed idea.
Funaki likes the ‘animated’ response from the viewer – allowing them to make their own associations with the work and their own meaning. The making of the work doesn’t emerge out of nothing but through the development of ideas over a long period of time.
Mari starts with a flat drawing – this approach comes from an Eastern perspective in the history of art making i.e. screens, woodcuts and scrolls. Initially when starting with the idea Mari is mentally thinking in two dimensions – then drawing out onto paper in two dimensions the ideas.
When actually making the work Mari then starts working and thinking in three dimensions – starting with a base piece of metal and working physically and intuitively around the object, to form a construction that evidences her feelings about what she wants to create. She likes the aesthetic beauty but uneasy aspect of a dead insect for example (like the Louise Bourgeois ‘Maman‘ spider outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao).
Now collaborating with architect Nonda Kotsalidis, Mari is working to produce her sculptural objects on a larger scale, up to 6 metres high. She needs the objects to have an emotional and physical impact on the viewer – both beautiful and threatening at one and the same time. How will her objects translate to a larger scale? Very well I think.
Funaki likes the physical distortion of space – and she likes telling a story to the viewer. She is working on a building where the facade is really strongly geometric and then she is embedding an emotion into the front of the building – constructing a narrative – constructing an emotional response with the viewer and establishing a relationship with the building. Here she is working from photographs of the space, her own recognition and remembrance of that space. She is having to work physically in 3D from the beginning for the first time, but still uses drawings to sketch out her ideas.
Several of Funaki’s pieces in the Cecily and Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award (2006) at the NGV Federation Square were inspired by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Their photographs of factories and gasworks, specifically the facades of such buildings (see images below), were the jumping off point for the development of the objects (the bracelets). Funaki takes the front of these buildings, a 3D structure ‘in reality’ but pictorially imaged on a 2D plane, and then twists and distorts their structure back into a 3D environment. The facades move up and around, as though a body is twisting around its own axis, pirouetting around an invisible central spine.
Each piece is created and then the next one is created in relation to the previous, or to each other. Each individual piece has its own character and relation to each other. They are never variations of the same piece with small differences – each is a separate but fully (in)formed entity. » (Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog)

 

 

Gallery FUNAKI
4 Crossley Street
Melbourne, Victoria
Australia 3000
PHONE [phone]
website: www.galleryfunaki.com.au
mail: [e-mail]

dans un MONDE SUB-AQUATIQUE naissent des BIJOUX ……

Ce n’est pas du matériau utilisé d’où je veux partir (genre je vais vous montrer des bijoux en nacre, en corail, etc ….) non, c’est de « l’impression marine » donnée …. comme une vague, de tous les côtés, qui doucement envahi les créateurs ….

Ce n’est pas tant le matériau qui compte, quoique …. corail, nacre, coquillage(s), oursins, galets…. ils ont leur mot à dire. Est-ce qu’ils viennent donner la « touche marine », en … « touche finale »,  ou sont-ils à l’origine de l’idée ? N’est-ce pas plutôt leur texture, leur aspect, leur granulé, je dirais presque leur « grain de peau », qui inspire ? qui donne l’idée de « faire comme si » ? Beaucoup de ces bijoux »aquatiques » sont en papier, silicone, argent, porcelaine, verre, feutre …. rien à voir avec ce que l’on est censé trouver en fond de mer (oui, enfin, rien de ce que l’on ETAIT censé trouver ….. maintenant ….. pfff ! ma brav’dame ! ……… ), mais ce qui merveilleux c’est que ces matériaux « terriens », voire industriels, nous parlent du fond des mers avec maestria, presque mieux que les « vrais », car ils ont un pouvoir d’évocation très fort, le rêve, l’imagination, l’interprétation sont libres de s’envoler : ce n’est pas « vraiment » du corail, mais ça fait penser au corail, ou à plus, à ce que l’on veut, à ce que l’on ressent  …. enfin, la maestria des matériaux qui nous parlent, je m’entends, plutôt la maestria des doigts de ces créateurs que j’envie tant (les doigts ET les créateurs ! )

Bon, assez parlé, des images !

(à chaque nom de créateur, cliquez et vous aurez accès à son site ou sa page web)

Ashley VICK (US) -  Sea Urchin Rings  –
Arcangelo BUNGARO - (IT) bague coquillage, perles, argent

Tzuri GUETA -(FR) collier ‘corail’ silicone  –  Ana HAGOPIAN -(ES) ‘coral’ necklace – papier

Aline KOKINOPOULOS (FR) bague oursin, argent & corail –bague ‘La ronde des Etoiles de mer’

Catherine JACQUET (FR) – colliers ‘Corail vivant’ et ‘cascade’ – plastiques

Barbara PAGANIN (IT) broche ‘fiore di luce’ – verre  (Galerie SLAVIK) –  GIIA (IT) « blue wave » felt neckpiece

Esty GROSSMAN  (FR) b.o. meduses-polypes – argent & cuivre 
Laurence OPPERMANN – (FR) bague oursin ‘constellation’ argent

Gilles JONEMANN (FR) collier-galet- LE fameux collier galet ! 
Evert NIJLAND (NL) necklace white porcelain… comme des squelettes marins ….
Gulnur OZDAGLAR – (Turquie) PET plastic necklace  -
Jean-François PEREÑA (FR) Galuchat de raie – Galuchat de roussette – Galuchat de requin – Plexiglas – Erable teint  Laiton – Maillechort – Cuir – Aventurine – Ebène ….. (cette liste me réjouit ! )

Patricia LEMAIRE (FR) Bague Péché d’Orgueil (photo Laurent Thion)–’ Eclat de Mediterranée’ – tour de cou suspension maillechort, argent, os, corail

Tosca TERAN (USA)  2009- an Un-Natural History – ‘Epigeous Conidiophorus’ – silver, enamel, silicone, borosilicate 
Victoria TAKAHASHI (USA)  wishing rock box

Willemijn de GREEF (NL) -  « weavings » necklace -wool, imitation coral, thread, plastic

Willemijn de GREEF (NL) -  broche  –  necklace (2005) zinc, teakwood, cotton-

Et pour finir, parce que la mer a besoin des rivières, et les rivières de la pluie, finissons sur/par un petit nuage !

Kyoko HASHIMOTO - (Japon) collier petit nuage (proposé par la galerie CARACTERE à Neuchatel (Suisse)