Dead Modern

Would you pin fish skin to your chest, tether a piece of driftwood to your finger with wire, or hang a bird skull around your neck? Nature in all its raw glory finds its way into pieces by four innovative jewellery designers.

The voice of Edina Monsoon from Absolutley Fabulous is ringing in my ear: “I’m also getting some of those lip plates from dead Amazonian Indians. I thought we could sell them as ashtrays. Don’t look at me like that, darling. We do take the lip off, you know!” Edina would have loved what these jewellers do: taxidermied birds; gilded claws and talons; and fish scales strung as beads. Yet, these materials aren’t actually so far removed from traditional gems. Rather than pull stones and metals out from under the earth, these jewellers scour the ground, transforming the (very) unexpected into something quite asounding.

Julia de Ville
A choker featuring a dead bird, a bracelet of bird bones, brooches of mice with emerald or ruby eyes and silver tails, or of small bats with bared teeth… Julia de Ville’s jewellery may appear grotesque and confrontational but it is, in fact, a celebration of the wonders of nature.
For the New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based jeweller and artist, using whole or parts of animals that have died through natural causes and decorating them with precious stones and metals is, she says, “about a love of animals”.
“Taxidermy is a very powerful medium and I have a message I am trying to get out. I am very vocal in my beliefs and morals and hope I can start making changes to the way people think about animals and death, to make them more accepting of their own mortality.”
For someone who turned vegetarian at nine, then wore her grandmother’s fox fur stole because “it was as good as having the animal near me” and by 15 knew she wanted to learn the art of taxidermy, Julia’s future path was cast at a young age. At 26 she exhibited at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology alongside fashion luminaries such as Jean-Paul Gaultier and John Galliano, at last September’s Gothic Glamour exhibition.
Being an animal rights activist, de Ville bases her art on “only materials that have been found or donated” to her. It is an organic process, with the resulting creations evolving naturally from what she has to work with. Mostly this is birds and mice but recently she has come across cats, and has been given two puppies and some sea horses. She has even started a fly and bee collection. What they will turn into she is yet to reveal. Jane Riley

Deadly Ponies Precious
For almost four years, designers Liam Bowden and Katie Smith have been turning out covetable leather bags and quirky animal-motif jewellery pieces under their label Deadly Ponies. This season, however, they’ve taken their jewellery collection to the next level, stepping up from the metallic bows and miniature animals they’d previously produced to cast-bronze bird claws and delicate bone flower buds and rosary beads. “We started out by playing around each season and then throwing it all out and starting fresh for the next collection,” explains Bowden. “We didn’t want these pieces to be so disposable. We wanted them to have more of an heirloom quality and nature has that. Also, we just liked [bones and animal skeletons] and found them interesting.”
Bowden and Smith met while both studying for their Bachelor of Design at Unitec, and while both majored in graphic design, they spent their weekends together working on projects of a more three-dimensional nature. Their bags were picked up by Auckland store Superette, and their first jewellery collection, Lion in My Pocket, followed soon after.
For this collection, they trawled beaches, back gardens, and the farms and forests near Smith’s home for bird skeletons, turning up delicate sparrow legs and pukeko skulls. “It was a little bit macabre,” Bowden admits. “I guess because we’re not actually killing the animals it doesn’t seem so bad. We just find skeletons. Nature’s already done its work.” They commissioned a local carver to create the bone pieces, and took casts of the skeletons, then reproduced the claws and skulls in bronze, which was oxidised and polished back to give it a more realistic feel. Some of the pieces have been ‘capped’ in silver, to “hide a bit of the naturalism”, says Bowden. “We have to be conscious of the level to which people like natural things. They don’t want something that’s too raw or too macabre. We’re just waiting for someone to ask us to do an exhibition piece so we can try out some of our more crazy ideas.” Melinda Williams

Pauline Bern
Since the late 1970s Pauline Bern has been honing her jewellery-making craft in New Zealand. What started out as an experiment after dropping out of university, travelling and “doing the whole soul-searching thing” has become a career that has spanned three decades. But the roots of her interest in jewellery go back all the way to her youth, she says. “My childhood was spent with my nose pointing at my feet, always picking stuff up. I’m a magpie… a lot of jewellers are.” In the 1980s she began using shells in her work, but it wasn’t until she designed a lei in the 1990s using Sunlight soap and clean nappy fabric that she became seriously engaged with the idea of repurposing found materials in her jewellery.
“Found materials bring a prior reading,” she explains. “People can recognise them as coming from somewhere else. I like the other life of a found material, and I like to try to trigger other memories through my pieces. Jewellery is a mnemonic.” Many of her works feature pieces of pohutukawa driftwood, scoria and water-worn flotsam and jetsam discovered on her walks along Narrow Neck Beach on Auckland’s North Shore. In Bern’s hands, tiny jewels are inserted into the small pieces of wood or rock, which are then strung onto fine pieces of wire or plastic, sometimes wrapped in strips of gold or silver. Bern says she enjoys the contradictions in the materials – things with no practical value paired with precious metals and gems. “Gold is such a permanent material. It doesn’t alter with time, which is why it has been the material of choice for jewellers. But by using materials that are fragile, I make things that people have to look after. They’re things that we just tromp all over, the everyday, the banal. By turning them into jewellery, I can make people notice that they have important or beautiful qualities.” Melinda Williams

Catarina Hällzon Momentary
Scaled a fish before? Or at least stood aside and watched as the fishmonger takes to one, silvery scales pinging from the skin and lightly ricocheting off the white plastic apron? The scales are then scrubbed down, washed away, tossed into a bin. But not if Catarina Hällzon is around. Hällzon, a jewellery designer from Stockholm, makes jewellery from animal parts that are usually considered waste: elk teeth, pig intestines and fish skin and scales.
In her recent collection, Momentary, it is in the manipulation of these delicate parts that her jewellery transforms from smelly compost filling to something precious. She variously tans, sews, and dries the skin or innards, and often gilds the pieces or adds miniscule gems which highlight the inherent imperfections of nature while connecting her work to traditional jewellery-making.
Although the materials Hällzon uses make the range sound gory or barbaric, her ideas often spring from a way to use the waste left over from a fishing trip or elk hunt. Her work may sound macabre but she prefers to think of her work as lending new life. Nicole Stock