MURMURation

Artist list

Silke Fleischer, Adam Grinovich, Dana Hakim,  Hannah Joris, Jorge Manilla, Peter Vermandere, Willy Vandevelde, Stephen Gallagher.

Far away a shape appears, a wave of individuals, volatile reverberations, captivating, emerging and constantly changing, filling your sight.
Come closer to hear the submerged whisper, blown by breathing voices, indistinctive, continuous public confessions, filling your mind.
A gathering, a group, a view, composed paradoxes, a form, unpredicted, dispatched, attracted to be repulsed and united.
A base of Belgian independent artists spread their wings, their mumbling now resonating globally, to form this murmuration. 

Silke Fleischer works with 3-dimensional structures that remind of familiar, existing objects. Composing with 3-d printing, she is looking for a certain balance between ratio and emotion. Her work does not include extras or function, to purposefully let the object/jewel speak for itself. With this minimalistic approach she carefully creates a new reality. Her scenes become a medium for human contemplation, persuading to show us something: Yourself in your world. 

Adam Grinovichs’ jewels are created from a variety of traditional religious marks –symbols, prayer beads-, in combination with chaotic naturalistic elements. This leading to a paradoxical juxtaposition between the aesthetics of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and matching glamour with the grotesque. He is interested in how previously unthinkable images are now assimilated into contemporary culture, and, in trying to balance a cultural saturation with a visceral potency. 

Dana Hakim senses a growing fear in our post-modern society implied by mass media and political agendas. Similar to amulets, which provided metaphysical safe-keeping in ancient times, she works with shapes and materials that currently relate to protection. That way, her jewels evoke a duality of identification and un-identification, a dynamic perception that allows a wide spectrum of analysis. Their hybrid character is not easily graspable from one singular view.

Hannah Joris is relentlessly fascinated by the expression of body parts. Her latest work revolves around the idea of bones, embodied by white yams. She reflects on human vulnerability through affectively honoring, stringing, and collecting bones in her jewelry, while her objects remind of rituals, alienating and confronting. Her drawings depict the fragmented body in relation to religion, vulnerability and sexuality. 

Jorge Manilla has found inspiration in Hamlets’ Ophelia, focusing on desire and tragedy for his most recent jewels. By the use of contrasting materials, leather, steel and wood, he contemplates premeditation, or, impulse of melancholic emotions identified with passion, nostalgia, madness and death. His emphatic works evoke ones’ inner Ophelia. 

Peter Vermandere works with real matter, he loves to research the convention and knowledge. Always with a solid connection to history and ancestry, both physical and in mind, to empower him. One of his favorite materials is stone, because of its inherent natural-cultural aspects. In his ‘Hotton Series’, mainly consisting of brooches, he combines fossil coral slabs with lathe-machined aluminum to create some sort of ambiguous symbiosis.

Willy Vandevelde creates jewels that do not go unnoticed. The bold statements in bright colors may seem futuristic, their materials have either been recuperated, or kept, since the eighties. Nevertheless, the well-crafted wearable objects touch a variety of subjects stimulating reflection, and lure you into his graphic dynamic universe. 

Writing by Broes Iterson