SIM LÜTTIN

ARTISTIC RATIONALE
With the 2020 bushfires, pandemic, social and political unrest in mind, Transcend responds to the difficult times we find ourselves. By bringing nature and beauty back into focus, this project asks, "In times of hardship, what are the things that are important to focus on? What comforts us in challenging times? How can the creation of contemporary art and craft help facilitate personal and cultural recovery and resilience?"
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Transcend is a time-based photography and art jewellery installation project focusing on nature's beauty as a counterbalance and provisional antidote to the impact of Covid-19 and other adverse local and global events. It's an online and real-life (IRL) project presented through a contemporary craft lens, inviting deep engagement and quiet repose.

"One response toward recovery is to return to familiar practices as a way to rebuild and reimagine. For me, it is seeking comfort in the process, repetition and searching for beauty in every day where disarming artistry can emerge while crafting something from nothing. To make new forms from the imagination that transcend their original state, creating new and thoughtful objects that reflect time and place."
—Sim Luttin, 2021
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Transcend will include a collection of new handmade neckpieces and sculptures, presented alongside digital photographs and a book conceived in the 2020 pandemic and Melbourne lockdown and started in January 2021. I will hang collections of contemporary art jewellery on walls in an apartment space — on shelves and from fixtures, possibly also shown inside custom-made frames.
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MATERIALS
Sterling silver, enamel, 18ct gold, rubber, sublimated aluminium, perspex, video.​
 
RESEARCH / QUOTES
"To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in."
—Oliver Sacks, 'Altered States', New Yorker, 2012