IT’S ALWAYS DARKEST JUST BEFORE DAWN is a year long time-based digital & art jewellery project.
The project is a contemporary multi-disciplinary enquiry that explores the significance of handmade objects at a time when people are engrossed in digital culture and mass-produced products.
In the West we live in a highly mediated society where the online world can be argued as replacing a more authentic, tactile one. We constantly upload photos and amass ubiquitous objects to validate our existence and create memories of ideal experiences. We live in the past and create unrealistic expectations for our future, leaving us in a general state of ambivalence and melancholy.
I’m interested in exploring these ideas and, in particular, ideas of inauthentic Vs authentic representation – imagery Vs object. In 2008 I began time-based investigations that attempt to find meaning in the everyday. The first, ‘The Temporary Nature of Things’ (2008) idealistically looked for beauty in the everyday, distilling daily observations into 366 jewellery pieces and artist books. The second, ‘These Moments Existed’ (2013) explored ideas of ambivalence and melancholy, by taking 365 digital photos that inspired wood and paper contemporary jewellery that were ambiguous or ephemeral in nature.
In 2014, IT’S ALWAYS DARKEST JUST BEFORE DAWN will pursue the creation of authentic representations, starting with digital (moving/still) documentation of my locale that will inform new and tangible, contemporary art jewellery. Academic Susan Luckman says, “Handmade objects are imbrued with touch and…offer a sense of the ‘authentic’ in an ‘inauthentic’ world”. Digital media is often how we perceive the world; engaging with objects is how we fully understand and physically connect with it.
This marks the beginning of this year long journey.