Is Jewellery Making Research?

Making is a means of doing research, a method to investigate hypothesis. This exhibition is about making as research or, more specifically, making jewellery to make sense of things.

This event presented a selection of pieces of Jewellery and their research portfolios, where the protagonist is not the jewel but the research investigation through making the artefact.

From a practice-based research perspective, the answers to these investigations take the shape of visual and physical artefacts.

The aim of this event was to provide an opportunity to the audience to engage with various stories behind the ideation of critical forms of enquiries manifested in artefacts that can be worn on the body. 

These pieces of jewellery examine the idea of media as something the researcher not only studies but also makes in the process of undertaking research. This selection of jewellery continues the active promotion toward recognising less conventional knowledge practices such as art jewellery, jewellery with a cultural or/and social impact. The production of research objects is displayed together with their ‘research portfolio’: papers, a poster, exhibition images and catalogues, some of these outputs are from the Journal of Jewellery Research (JJR).

The selected research projects are by Jonathan Boyd, and Katharina Vones (Royal College of Art, Programme Applied Art, Jewellery & Metal, London), Zihan Zhou, Yajie Hu, Wenyan Lu and Roberta Bernabei (School of Art and Design, Loughborough University).

Manifested in its various forms, these research projects provide a lens through which we can analyse the values, aspirations of our society and reflect upon our views on them.