Be-hind, Be-fore and Be-yond
Naomi Filmer
Judith Clark Costume Gallery
26 October - 13 November 1999

Naomi Filmer's first solo show seeks a new environment for exhibiting contemporary jewellery that is neither jewellery gallery nor catwalk fashion show. It is a collection of work with the themes of intimacy and identity.

The pieces are made of glass, ceramic, ice, silver and soap. The materials explore interactions between the intrinsic preciousness of objects and their attributed value. Some of the pieces are solely for exhibition while others are to be bought and worn.

The location of pieces on the body - behind the ear, under the chin, under the arm and on the inside of the forearm - express intimacy, identity, and experience. The materials are fragile and have preciousness independent of their material value.

Over the last five years Naomi has worked collaboratively with fashion designers Hussein Chalayan, Julien McDonald, Tristan Webber, Shelley Fox, Dai Rees and has been featured in catwalk collections during London Fashion Week.

Naomi Filmer's jewellery and body sculpture is post-industrial artist craftwork: it both sustains and elaborates the challenge of modernism to the essentialist aesthetics of utility.

Her jewellery is made to be worn and can adorn the body whilst also necessitating a reconfiguring, even a temporary disfiguring of it. The work in this show moves beyond, however, into a clearly postmodernist orientation towards the elementalism of jewellery and its relation to the body. Filmer uses elemental resources in her craft, the most ubiquitous is water: as essential to the body as it is to the crafting of jewellery. The work that has sought to illuminate into relief the less adorned features of the body is now elaborated into ice jewellery that dissolves into water. These moulded pieces are just that: ice, and have an ultimate transitoriness as such - they are final fashion pieces. This is postmodernist craft at its most conceptually and creatively ironic. The form of an ice jewellery does not so much follow any intended function as dictate it. However much a moulded ice finger - between or ear - behind may resemble their permanent counterparts in metal at the point of being worn, their reductive deterioration into water begins immediately, hastened by the homeostatic heat of the body in response to their frigid chill which forces inversions of its shapes into their form. The thaw soaks skin, hair and clothing, its thawing anointment accelerated by the interaction - generated warmth of the social occasions on which jewellery is characteristically worn. These pieces are to be worn out in every sense, as their water finds paths across barely visible skin textures and contours made by the relief of veins, protrusion of bones, tracing planes across the cheek, sinews of the neck, hollows of shoulders and chest. Waters have different textures and degrees of clarity which are revealed when they are repeatedly reconstituted as ice. Filmer has made work to match the ice pieces that seek to hold these qualities in the less immediately transitory condition of clear soap and the forged permanence of glass. Water's dissolution from ice is inverted in the soap pieces, which contain translucent glass jewellery that can barely be seen and can only be accessed by dissolving the encasing soap with water to reveal their fixed translucence. The bust of chin and shoulders - anonymously figurative - cast in clear glass can be seen to collect the common thematic qualities of all these pieces. Its polished exterior reveals an unfinished inner surface, carrying the impression of the model's skin in an echo of the surface textures revealed by the melting of the ice pieces. It is reminiscent of earlier work from the beginning of the decade, remembered and now refined into the elemental reductions essential to the explorations that will result in new work for the next century.

Paul Filmer
for catalogue of 'Behind Before Beyond' JudithClarkCostume 1999