EC: It’s an honour to work with you. Your art jewellery project is incredible! Would you like to share with us your idea behind this new collection?
MOD: First of all, thank you for your kind words. I’m delighted my work fits your vision of small sculpture as wearable art.The Winter Branches are an ongoing stream feeding the flow of Doner Studio. As I walk the forests as well as urban streets my eyes follow the wonderful branching patterns of trees. For years I have picked up small twigs, their dynamic patterns mostly flattened underfoot. They became an unplanned collection detailing the genius of variety, growth, and form in nature.The jump to jewellery was spontaneous as well. I left the cast bronze twigs dark as the wood they once were, and old cut diamonds both brought them light and replicated the sense of dew, or a touch of frost, a nod to their life in different seasons.
EC: I find that your art has this special connection with underground energies. How would you describe the relationship between your large-scale works and art jewellery? Does the latter engage with the same energies as the former?
MOD: Both the jewellery and large public works of art come from the same well within. They speak the same language, a mother tongue, a lingua franca. The only difference is scale, and that also bends to function.
EC: This is not the first time you have approached jewellery. How long has it been since your last project? How has your relationship with the medium of jewellery evolved in the meanwhile? And how did you decide to return to jewellery after the break?
MOD: I made the first piece of jewellery over fifty years ago. Intermittently I have made a work or two, always for myself or family and friends. In 1990 I created a silver necklace with cosmic charms for fashion designer Ronaldus Shamask as a counterweight to hold up a dress. It was a great success; now resides in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, NY. In 2000, I was invited to create a collection for ELP in Rome, cuff bracelets with bronze and diamonds, a forerunner of the Winter Branch, now also in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. After that, I was invited by Christofle to create a collection. The necklace Palmaceae will be exhibited this fall at Musee des Arts Decoritifs in Paris as part of the celebration of Christofle as a French heritage brand. The prototype Frond necklace is in that museum’s collection as well.
EC: In previous interviews you recalled how gathering natural finds on the shore was something you loved to do during your childhood in Florida. Your work seems to translate this practice into the realm of art. Your pieces have the compelling allure of archaeological natural finds. Would you like to tell us if and how this applies to this new collection of jewellery?
MOD: Your observation is correct. I am a lifetime hunter-gatherer. The new collection for Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery originated in this manner.
EC: As an artist who has such a deep connection with nature, I would love to know more about your relationship with it and your stance against climate change. Do you think art and art jewellery have the power to inspire reflection and awareness and drive change?
MOD: Absolutely. Art and nature share the ability to create the wonderful release we feel when watching the path of a bird in flight, observing light at dawn break through the dark, or a sunset hanging in the evening sky, for example. We “unself”. Artists have a moral responsibility to help foster a return to a connection that was severed by the Industrial Revolution and continues to erode. We have the capacity to create works of art that bring our audiences into the realm of wonder and magic. The natural world is embedded deep in the human psyche, artists can and will make it rise up again.
EC You have often been described as an alchemic shaman for your talent to transform matter into a spiritual experience. How do you feel about it? Do shamanism and alchemy play a role in your practice or are they spontaneous outcomes?
MOD: The Lascaux shamans painted the hopes and dreams of their clans with sticks and fingers. They transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary. We are still amazed. With a project such as A Walk on the Beach at Miami International Airport, I undertook the opportunity given to me in trust by the city I was born in to create something transformative that represented the magic of the place, assisted by a few tons of mother of pearl! I should have named ‘mollusks’ as the sorcerer’s apprentices on the credit plague!
EC: Critics described your art as both ‘meditative’ and ‘volcanic’. Do you agree? Is it for you a harmonic synthesis between opposites or more of an estranging coexistence? Does this involve your jewellery as well?
MOD: I would have to agree with that assessment. That said, it’s not a unique dichotomy. There is after all the notion of yin/yang. And the wonderful zen koan “silence, like thunder.” There’s also the idea of the zen stroke, meditating until you lift the arm and make that mark! I think we could stretch these ideas to include this jewellery collection. The bronze branch is harder, darker, and linear. The diamonds are visually softer as they are heirlooms, old cuts, round, and bright as the stars above, and each one is unique.
EC: You once said that the mystery of fragments is more interesting to you than anything intact. Does it apply to your new collection of jewellery as well? When making an art jewellery piece, how do you deal with the idea that the piece will be worn by someone and will be integrated into their body?
MOD: Back to the future. The shells I discovered on the beaches of my early childhood were mostly fragments. The corals certainly were always bits and pieces, rolled around in quartz sand, the primal lapidary. Where had they come from and what did they attach to – questions usually left to the imagination to answer.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.