Artist Gésine Hackenberg transforms bowls, ceramic plates, and dishes into stunning pieces of jewelry. By using dinnerware as her raw material, she extracts tiny discs from them and strings them together like beads or inlays them among metal for rings and earrings. Hackenberg focuses on the decorative part of a plate or bowl, like Delft patterns, that results in colorful and unassuming pieces of wearable art. If you did not know the story behind this ceramic jewelry, you would never realize they were once used for enjoying a meal.
Hackenberg’s work is a reframing of common objects into the perspective of jewelry. By altering the context of where we see the earthenware, Hackenberg gives it a new and unexpected existence. In cutting up the dishes, she's putting a twist on what is possible for beading.
Her plates and bowls come from secondhand shops. After Hackenberg has selected the pieces she will use for her jewelry, she uses a manual drilling machine to form the beads, or as she calls them, “pearls.” When the extraction is done, the small elements are then arranged into wearable pieces. They are never entirely divorced from the source, however. When not being worn, the jewelry is meant to be near the dishes with holes punched in them.
Gésine Hackenberg: Website
COMMENTS