Opening Night October 1, running until October 29

unnatural, naturally – Lauren Simeoni and Melinda Young
With a delight in finding expressions of the ‘natural’ in the ‘unnatural’ (and vice versa), Simeoni and Young exploit the potential of found objects in their work, playing with colour and materiality. The conceptual ideas for this exhibition have been developed using a shared sketchbook, which migrates back and forth between their studios. The exhibition features work with a focus on botany and the body – re-presenting and re-configuring natural forms via artificial conduits. Creating, utilising and manipulating non-specific artificial objects: changing the unnatural to the natural, the artists have developed playful bodies of new work which speak to each other through an excited engagement of ideas and material sensibility.

Lauren Simeoni (Adelaide) and Melinda Young (Sydney) create work that is a homage to the senses – a wearable passport to a whimsical ‘other’ reality. Exploring the potential for unexpected narrative, their works often have a sly subversive humour. Finding the beautiful and seductive in what is otherwise thought of as mundane, toying with mass-production processes and reconfiguring mass-produced objects to create wearables of seductive beauty. Simeoni has a Bachelor of Arts (Gold and Silversmithing) from Canberra School of Art and undertook a Design Associateship at the JamFactory in Adelaide. Young has a Master of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts. Both artists exhibit widely in Australia and overseas.

Flip Side – Velvet da Vinci

JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design Centre

Jewellers from the Metals Design Studio look at the Flip Side in their exhibition currently showing at Velvet da Vinci in San Francisco. Exhibiting artists are Alisa Dewhurst, Kath Inglis, Tassia Joannides, Sim Luttin, Sally Mahony, Lauren Simeoni, Belinda Newick and Melissa Turner

Velvet da Vinci Gallery in San Francisco presents “Flip side: Jewelry from JamFactory”, a show featuring new work from eight established Australian jewelers. Sue Lorraine, Creative Director of the Metals Design Studio and curator of Flip side, explains that the intention of this exhibition was to push these artists into a new dimension of their work. “There is always more than one point of view, always several ways to look at something, from the back and the front, the inside and the outside, the upside and the downside, the safe side and the flip side.” However, instead of creating drastically new pieces for the exhibition, Lorraine found that their mature and assured practice has allowed them to push the boundaries of their everyday work. For the last 30 years, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design Centre, located in Southern Australia, has been a center for the design, production, exhibition and sale of work by leading and emerging Australian designers / makers.

An exhibition catalog is available.
The artists exhibiting in the show are: Alisa Dewhurst, Kath Inglis, Tassia Joannides, Sim Luttin, Sally Mahony, Lauren Simeoni, Belinda Newick, Melissa Turner.

Tassia Joannides uses the common zipper as her medium. She has given this one-dimensional form body and substance. The armbands intentionally blur the boundaries between the inside and out. By unzipping and zipping they become part of the wearer, an intimate experience.

Melissa Turner uses stainless steel to create fluid and soft forms of beauty. There is no front or back, no pin back, no pendant, no ring shank, only fluid forms. These forms stand as an act of defiance to the jewelry world, without a wearable function.

Sally Mahony uses primarily stainless steel in her work. She manipulates the material to both extremes, making it corrode and shine to a satiny, seductive black. The brooches peel away from the body exposing fabric or metal beneath.

Kath Inglis again is a manipulator of materials. She carves PVC into three-dimensional wearable sculptures. Kath is inspired by the colors of shadows and reflections in water. Just as water has no top or bottom, no starting or ending point, her jewelry is a continuous ripple on the wearer.

Lauren Simeoni’s brooches reflect the impact materials have on the world. She is a lover of materials and the impact these material leave. In this series of brooches she has printed nostalgic images on aluminum and reveals a time of personal innocence.

Sim Luttin made this body of work while recently living in the U.S. As a visitor she was hyper-aware of her surroundings. Her necklaces reflect and magnify nature with their seed-like forms as vessels strung from dark beads.

Alisa Dewhurst and Belinda Newick have used the body as their starting points. Alisa crochets necklaces illustrating the repetitive genetic message of DNA, the building material that makes up each individual. She mimics this process in crocheted wire. Belinda uses the necklace to discuss the fragility, fertility and fecundity of the female anatomy.