Wings Pendants

Titanium, 925 silver, stainless steel
Image: Andrew Sikorski

Wings Installation 2004

Titanium, 925 silver, photographic image, entomology pins
1400 x 300mm

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Telescopic Bead 2009

925 silver, acetal, 750 gold, winner 2009 Giving Beads Award
Image: Terence Bogue, courtesy of e.g.etal

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Transit Necklace

Aluminium, titanium, stainless steel
Image: Phoebe Porter

Racetrack Necklace

Glass, titanium, stainless steel
Image: Phoebe Porter

Wings and Rotary Bracelets

Titanium, 925 silver
Image: Andrew Sikorski

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Rotary Rings

Titanium, 925 silver
Photo: Andrew Sikorski

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In 2005 Phoebe Porter relocated from Canberra to live and work in Melbourne. That experience generated this body of work. It was an experience she came to define as being about connectedness: about finding her way in a new city, as well as staying in touch with the place she had left.

With map in hand we can find our way from A to B. But location is not only about streets and pavements. It is about identity and our inner emotional life as well. Relocating, one is transformed from a local to a stranger, from being in the centre of a network of friends to being anonymous. The reassurance we are given on maps as we enter a town, or emerge from a train station, that ‘You are here’ confirms a place and a time, but not the how or the why. It may have an ironic cosmic ring to it at times, but the personal and emotional element is necessarily absent.

Porter’s Location Devices offer a metaphysics of transit. To devise, she notes, means both to plan or design and to dream or imagine. All are equally pertinent to making a new city one’s home. What but dreams prompt such moves? Harry Beck’s famous London Underground map of 1933, from which her objects take their cue, came eventually to organise the very city it mapped. It shaped the way people experienced the city. Porter builds on this personalisation:

“I decided to use schematic maps as a metaphor for networks, direction and belonging – for developing a personal route through life.”

In cartographic style, let me propose a key to understanding these works. Porter’s titles form the primary set of four reference points: Connected, Transit, Express and Location Device. These are all resonant of physical travel, by foot, road, rail or air.

Ingeniously, the jeweller’s devices from which the necklaces are constructed enact these functions on the body. Porter comments that as she was making these works she was aware that “…there is an interesting relationship between the way we simplify geography to understand a transport network and how we simplify ideas, memories, and information to understand our place in the world.”

The linking mechanism – Connected – uses ball bearings and is multidirectional. We are, I suggest, linked to such things as place, time, work and friends. These ‘links’ are the kind of defining choices that shape our lives. There is, however, some flexibility in the way we maintain these connections. Consequently, the links allow the pieces to move with the body.

The linear elements – Transit – take us from one place to another. In Porter’s neck pieces, these can be personalised by connecting them in a variety of ways. In a similar fashion, our lines of transit are determined by ever changing things such as favourite places, commitments, habit and efficiency of movement.

Clarity of purpose – Express – is the hallmark of Beck’s schematic map. His system has been adopted around the world, and not only for rail travel. The circular nodes, which broadly speaking represent relay points, quantify distance or progress. The movement through these nodes may be of blood, of electricity, of trains or of a necklace around a body.

“I love the idea that the same drawing could represent any type of network: an electrical circuit, a computer network, the transportation system, a network of friends or colleagues”, says Porter.

Ease of passage is often coded: for example the daily ticket, eligibility for concession, priority status. We carry such ‘tickets’ on our person, ready to declare our legitimacy. Colour is frequently a marker of these distinctions. The colour blue, for instance – Location Device – refers to the process of creativity for Porter. She explains:

“I was particularly moved by a scene from William Kentridge’s Stereoscope, in which usually invisible lines of communication (connections between people) are drawn in cobalt blue, shooting from the telephone switchboard out in all directions across the city.”

Blue, used in Location Device, is therefore the colour of telecommunication and is, with mobile technology, an exponentially growing, more intricate network. Red remains the traditional, symbolic colour for denoting the blood that courses within our bodies along that internal arterial network. Yellow is, happily, the colour of London’s Circle Line, the closed circuit mirrored in Melbourne. Colour has an additional role when working with aluminium or titanium, because through anodising the metal’s surface hardness is increased.

Porter’s clip-on Location Device is, for me, the opposite of the GPS systems that locate you with unnerving, dogged accuracy anywhere on the globe. With this jewellery – with adornment – you locate yourself in the network of your own particular and individual life: your allegiances, achievements, status, and predilections.

Merryn Gates
June 2008

Note: all quotes from the artist are from correspondence with the author, January – May 2008.

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22.02.10 The Workbench Guide to Jewelry Techniques – Anastasia Young

Phoebe’s work has been included in The Workbench Guide to Jewelry Techniques. This comprehensive and ambitious workshop reference for jewellers brings together a vast range of skills, techniques, and technical data in one volume…

Thank you to langdonlorraine for their great site design and Lee Wong for making it happen!

Andrew Sikorski Photography

Blanche Tilden Contemporary Jewellery

Cinnamon Lee Contemporary Jewellery

Merryn Gates Arts Writing

Photoculture Photography by Matthew Butler

Rhiannon Slatter Photography

Studio Hacienda Blog

General Assembly is the industrial design term for a technical drawing that shows how all the parts of a product fit together. Our project makes reference to the traditional pick’n’mix marketing method often used to display and sell small, multiple items. It taps into our desire to choose, collect and consume.

The brooch form is the most universal, easy to wear and least gender specific jewellery object. It makes reference to badges, nametags, entry passes and insignia – the everyday jewellery that gives us access, indicates privilege and shows membership. By exhibiting this project we hope to demonstrate that serially produced objects can be made as important and valuable as one-offs.

Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of serial production demonstrated in the work of craftspeople such as Melbourne contemporary jeweller, Susan Cohn, and German master goldsmith, Friedrich Dau, we have produced interchangeable components of varying colour, texture, form and material that are laid out in a “production line” ready to pick’n’mix. Architectural details and signage found around Melbourne’s CBD were the starting points from which each design evolved.

We invite you to participate in our collaborative process and select the parts for a brooch that will become part of the exhibition. We encourage you to examine your motives for making a particular selection, as we believe that this process of choosing is fundamental to what makes any piece of jewellery desirable. Through the process of selection and assembly, the parts will take on a new preciousness –they will be elevated to the status of a completed, owned brooch and added to the wall display. During the exhibition, the production line of individual parts will begin to empty, as the wall fills up and the focus of the artwork will shift from our contribution to your contribution.

The completed brooches will be numbered, so that you can see the first brooch, the tenth brooch, the one-hundredth brooch, and observe the changes that occur through the series. We hope to generate interest and discussion as patterns of choice emerge and we encourage you to return and see how General Assembly progresses. The mass of assembled brooches will be a visual record of all the participants in the project.

At the end of the exhibition, each brooch will become a personal memento of involvement in the event, and a souvenir of the cultural life of Melbourne in 2007.

Phoebe Porter and Blanche Tilden, 2007

General Assembly is an ongoing collaborative jewellery project conceived, designed and made by Phoebe Porter and Blanche Tilden, aka Studio Hacienda. The project invites the public to participate by selecting from pre-fabricated parts to create their own souvenir brooch. It was first shown in March 2007 at as part of
Solutions for Better Living curated by Kate Rhodes, Craft Victoria.

When we held our General Assembly – Open Studio 09 event for the 2009 State of Design Festival, the wonderful Ben Landau made this little film of our project in action:

Thanks to Ben for his excellent work! Visit his website to see more of the many projects he has worked on www.benlandau.com

Visit the Studio Hacienda blog to see much more about this project…

General Assembly is the industrial design term for a technical drawing that shows how all the parts of a product fit together. Our project makes reference to the traditional pick’n’mix marketing method often used to display and sell small, multiple items. It taps into our desire to choose, collect and consume.

The brooch form is the most universal, easy to wear and least gender specific jewellery object. It makes reference to badges, nametags, entry passes and insignia – the everyday jewellery that gives us access, indicates privilege and shows membership. By exhibiting this project we hope to demonstrate that serially produced objects can be made as important and valuable as one-offs.

Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of serial production demonstrated in the work of craftspeople such as Melbourne contemporary jeweller, Susan Cohn, and German master goldsmith, Friedrich Dau, we have produced interchangeable components of varying colour, texture, form and material that are laid out in a “production line” ready to pick’n’mix. Architectural details and signage found around Melbourne’s CBD were the starting points from which each design evolved.

We invite you to participate in our collaborative process and select the parts for a brooch that will become part of the exhibition. We encourage you to examine your motives for making a particular selection, as we believe that this process of choosing is fundamental to what makes any piece of jewellery desirable. Through the process of selection and assembly, the parts will take on a new preciousness –they will be elevated to the status of a completed, owned brooch and added to the wall display. During the exhibition, the production line of individual parts will begin to empty, as the wall fills up and the focus of the artwork will shift from our contribution to your contribution.

The completed brooches will be numbered, so that you can see the first brooch, the tenth brooch, the one-hundredth brooch, and observe the changes that occur through the series. We hope to generate interest and discussion as patterns of choice emerge and we encourage you to return and see how General Assembly progresses. The mass of assembled brooches will be a visual record of all the participants in the project.

At the end of the exhibition, each brooch will become a personal memento of involvement in the event, and a souvenir of the cultural life of Melbourne in 2007.

Phoebe Porter and Blanche Tilden, 2007