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profiling the life and work of creators around the globe
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Warwick Freeman
202Daniel Korb
204Bassamfellows
New Zealand
contemporary
jeweller,
Warwick
Freeman,
on making
meaning from
‘found’ objects
indesignlive.com
arwick Freeman’s latest
work for the Auckland Art
Fair, in lapis lazuli and jet, is
a deliberate departure from
his usual studies in New Zealand’s
native materials. He has worked
non-indigenous matter into simple
geometric forms – spheres, cubes,
cylinders and discs – and added the
quirky figure Miki, a ‘found’ shape and
oblique reference to primitivism.
“Style-wise, they all sing from a
Modernistic songbook,” says Freeman.
“Modernist ‘found objects’ – re-issued
tunes, but without ironic treatment,
just affection.”
While the materials may be foreign,
Freeman’s approach is certainly not.
In these ‘souvenirs’ from art history,
he displays the kind of thinking at the
heart of his practice: autobiographical
journeys through physical and
conceptual terrain, through which
objects and ideas are put to new use.
“I deal a lot with the history of the
found object,” he explains, “and the
definition of the ‘found’ can wander
across cultural and social concepts as
much as it can something found on the
road and reinvented. I found one of
my recent pieces on the Internet, and
that’s fair game. Those appropriations
are already loaded. There’s a decision
behind what you take, what you
appropriate in that manner.”
He constructs meaning through a
vocabulary of materials, symbols and
motif. Sometimes he is quite literal,
but more often he plays with ambiguity
W
and interpretation, inviting different
readings. Even an apparently simple
piece like Leaf fits within a larger
statement and body of work.
“To me, materials operate as a
language. It’s almost like the ideas don’t
really exist until they have the words to
describe them, so the materials become
the words in that process – you finally
put a name to them.”
And Freeman is highly articulate,
not just in his jewellery, but also
through his writing and seminars. We
see his plays on ‘language’ in some
obvious examples – his 26 Alphabet
Rings and series of Sentences from
2002 to 2003. More subtly, his ‘travel
diary’, North Cape to Bluff, is written
with a series of rings made from stones
he collected journeying from New
Zealand’s tip to its tail. Throughout
his work, there is a deliberate loop of
dialogue between maker and wearer,
and maker and observer.
His travels have taken him through
contested territory. In the early 1980s,
he was a prominent member of a group
which began exploring the use of local
materials in contemporary jewellery.
Their work reflected a changing
New Zealand cultural and political
environment. “We were caught up in
a historical moment triggered by the
new Labour government,” he says.
“They declared us nuclear-free, and
started developing a foreign policy
that was about living in the South
Pacific, as opposed to being an adjunct
of Europe,” says Freeman. “Our work
got swept up in it and adopted as
‘emblematic’ in the way jewellery can.”
This wasn’t a deliberate strategy. As
Freeman notes, “We didn’t set out to
adorn the decade.” But, it did highlight
to him how he could calculate his role
as a maker. “I started to see how it
worked. I started to unpick the ways
which jewellery related to time and
place, and to make decisions around
what things would trigger a response.”
In addition to the political potential
and ‘voice’ of the work, he developed
techniques with ‘found’ materials
during this period and combined the
two ideas.
One of his best-known works is
Whistle (1993). Through its koru-shaped
pendant, he joined the debate about
the cultural misappropriation by
contemporary artists of this Maori
motif – the shape of an unfurling fern.
Scholar, Damian Skinner said the
piece was, “a rape-whistle for cultural
violation, and a referee’s whistle for
anyone wanting to join an increasingly
acrimonious debate.”
In the New Zealand of the 1990s,
public discussion of cultural identity
was vigorous, and Freeman’s was an
influential voice in the arts.
Since, he has continued to work
with local materials and motifs,
and extended his collecting to the
found objects of industrialism – tool
remnants and discarded engine parts.
In the 2011 exhibition, SHED, he
remade a collection of industrial
objects for display as a shadow board.
Out of context – the ‘gallery’ is a shed
on the South Island’s Nelson wharves
– the objects look like remnants from
a previous inhabitant, although each
is quite wearable. A plastic gasket
and a flattened matchbox are remade
in blackened silver, and a piece of
flattened exhaust is made in fine gold.
“The reason I’ll pick up this piece of
exhaust pipe from the road,” he says,
“is that it’s already loaded, it’s a piece of
20th Century Modernism. It has Henry
Moore and primitive qualities. It’s all
about finding the ‘found’.”
Andrea Stevens is
Indesign’s Contributing Editor
in New Zealand, based in Auckland.
pulseindesign 201
Previous Page Warwick
Freeman in his studio
Left SHED installation (2011)
Right Miki pendant (2011)
Middle Whistle pendant
(1993) uses the koru motif
of an unfurling fern
Far Right Black Ball in
Blue Box pendant (2011)
words ANDREA STEVENS
Portrait SIMON DEVITT
Warwick Freeman
“To me, materials always operate as a language”
Warwick Freeman
Lives Auckland, New Zealand
Works as a jeweller
Education Largely self-taught, with no
formal art training beyond secondary school
Represented by Fingers, Auckland;
Bowen Galleries, Wellington; Gallery Funaki,
Melbourne; Galerie Ra, Amsterdam
fingers.co.nz
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