Area Denial | Matthew Freeman

From the exhibition Emerging Contemporaries (Room sheet #44).

Year: 2022

Materials: Steel, stainless steel.

Dimensions: 140 x 50 x 55mm

About the Maker: 

As a contemporary jewellery maker and artist, Freeman engages with jewellery as a history, a culture and as an action. Their Honours project has explored the potential for jewellery to sublimate violence. Historically, culturally and performatively jewellery exists before and after violence: through bloody trade, the spoils of war and ultimately as an expression of power. Drawing from these contexts, Freeman hopes to provoke new understandings of violence through objects that reclaim individual freedom, expose fantasies and desires whilst also critiquing societal hypocrisies.

The main questions guiding Freeman's creative process has been: Can jewellery become a force multiplier, an enabler of the wearers will? What freedoms might be extricated through the wearing? The work negotiates a makeshift aesthetic – a wiki how for violence enabling jewellery- combined with a crafted value usually used associated with gold and silver smithing. Between the improvised and the carefully crafted, sits the agency of the wearer and the violent potential of these objects to enable transformational change.

Available for shipment or collection from 20 March, 2023.

Photos: Matthew Freeman