Featuring a selection of Chan’s PhD Jewellery work from her time at RMIT 2009-12, this work explores connections between jewellery and the city through a series of projects within specific urban situations of Melbourne, Ramallah, and Christchurch.
Chan is interested in jewellery’s life within the system of a city: both as a set of processes that transform ‘dead’ waste matter into something new, and an object that circulates in urban life attached to mobile bodies.
URBAN METABOLISM SERIES, Melbourne 2009-12
The work in the Urban Metabolism Series recounts Chan’s preliminary phase of research. Having moved to Melbourne from Auckland to begin her PhD. Chan walked the streets seeking clues for how to engage and comprehend the complexity of the city. Through a process of gathering then decomposing materials by cutting and reassembling them into new formations with a repeated fold action. Chan explored questions of how jewellery practice might intercept and transform the city’s flows of waste-materials and link them up with the body.
SITUATION PALESTINE, Ramallah 2010
These works were made in 2010 when Chan’s partner took a contract in Ramallah, Palestine. Today in 2024 the pieces take on a new poignancy.
Chan said “Exploring the city and gathering materials, my lasting impression was the contrast between the recurring boundaries, in place to restrict the movement of bodies….the paradox of fighting over the land-as-territory while the environment fell into disrepair.”
In Ramallah Chan was limited to basic hand tools culminating in a series of brooches woven from olive and vegetable cans. Olives are a Palestinian symbol of rootedness to the land, the cans evoking the struggle to retain land in the face of the encroaching wall and Jewish settlements. Reflecting the contradictions of the political situation, with all the brand names on the cans being Israeli.
HOST A BROOCH, Christchurch 2011
We have 4 brooches left from this iconic project hosted six months after the devastating February earthquake. Chan gathered materials from around Christchurch and transformed them into 16 brooches. Presented in a shipping container over six weekends as part of the Christchurch Arts Festival, people were invited to take a brooch on a two-hour excursion through the city.
Chan said “Surprisingly, given the circumstances, most wearers reported uplifting and enhancing experiences. The project offered an opportunity to reconnect with the city – for many wearers, for the first time since the February earthquake. Many described a sense of hope because the project honed attention to what remained rather than what had been destroyed”.
Courtesy of The National, Christchurch
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