CRAFTS
MARCH/APRIL 2005
CZECH IT OUT
Over
four years in the making, this was a carefully selected survey of
current work by 13 makers from the Czech Republic. Kath Libbert's
predilection for Czech jewellery arose from an interest in tracing
her mother's lineage within that country, and her network of friendships
and expert contacts has grown gradually through visits to the republic.
If we don't know very much about these artists, we shouldn't put
it down to our own insularity, she says, for there are hardly any
contemporary jewellery galleries in the Czech Republic, and little
financial support for contemporary makers.
Blanka Sperkova (whose surname appropriately refers to jewellery
in Czech) was probably the most prominent of the names here, and
her predilection for grotesquely surreal black humour accorded with
our preconceived notions of a typically Czech sensibility. It came
as no surprise to find that Sperkova is also an illustrator and
animator. With her fingers she 'knits' with thin metal wire:employing
the traditional techniques of Slovak tinkers. Her digital choreography
brings forth light but robust wire forms (often achieving a sculptural
scale), which metamorphose to incorporate puppet-like human forms,
weird beasts, hidden devils, hearts, breasts and sexual organs.
But the path of Czech art and design through the previous century
has been characterised equally by a parallel strain of formal Apollonian
abstraction. This persisting tendency was represented here by the
youngest maker, Katerina Jancarova, whose delicate plastic 'volumes'
perch on the shoulder or chest. Jaroslav Prasil's flaxen wrist bands
and other fabric body ornaments were just as formal, but not overtly
attention seeking. Prasil grows and spins his own flax, and his
personal ethos is implicit in the deceptive simplicity of what he
makes.
The work of the 13 artists in the exhibition was as varied as that
of designer-makers from any modern Western economy. And yet it was
surely not wishful thinking to detect here a number of undercurrents
particular to the part of Middle Europe from which these objects
derive. The feeling of proceeding against all odds is probably familiar
in one way or another to all of these artists, and it was one that
was reflected in the imaginative ways in which - as Kath Libbert
put it these artists are able to 'create a lot from very little'.
Quotidian found materials wittily de-stabilised the stereotype of
the preciousness of jewellery. In his attractive brooches, Petr
Vogl uses rounded bars of commercial coloured soap as seating for
tiny heart-shaped Bohemian garnets. Some of Jolana Novakova's silver
brooches were the cast shapes of ordinary edible biscuits. Ludmila
Sikolova makes her brooches from sliced-up credit cards - inspired
by a visit to the USA without one - in a fashion reminiscent of
the methodically displaced photocollages of Jiri Kolar.
Several of these Czech jewellers re-cycled humble beef-bones and
horns - domestic detritus otherwise without value. Kamila Housova
combined bone with silver to create pinned brooches, which look
almost timeless. Jana Strilkova's bone and silver ornaments likewise
echoed Oceanic or Central Asian museum pieces, were it not for the
small photographic transparencies that some of them incorporated.
Lucie Krejcova's intimate, elegant brooches juxtapose bone with
things like tiny sprigs of green plastic foliage. She feels that
she is struggling to rediscover this ancient, even prehistoric ornamental
material in modern terms, belying its 'absolute depreciation as
meat and bone meal'.
Another propensity underlying many of the pieces was the creation
of playful private worlds within which to remove oneself from the
privations of daily life. Marketa Sumanova, for example, hopes that
her flowery neckpieces will convey the wearer to 'a little bit of
a dream world - something very delicate and unreal - in contrast
with everyday life, which is so real and materialistic.' We expect
opportunities to acquaint ourselves, synoptically, with contemporary
jewellery from other countries to come from the subsidised sector
- public galleries and museums. But like the eyeopening exhibition
of contemporary Catalan jewellery presented by Kath Libbert in 2002,
her private gallery once again provided both an invaluable opportunity
(only made commercially feasible by the Czech Republic's entry into
the EU) to see new work from another European country, and an irresistible
acquisition opportunity.
DAVID BRIERS
