Reinventing a sense of place. Crete and the jewellery object

Jewellery objects are often created within a context that mirrors the time and space in which they are made, and they increasingly contribute to practices that investigate place and identity. This project is about the ways in which jewellery objects can initiate an engagement with, and understanding of, cultural and personal place.

The research seeks to investigate jewellery as a nexus to critically engage with cultural and geographic space, conceptualising it through a complex framework of conscious and unconscious perceptions of place.

This research project specifically examines my experience of Crete, through an investigation and manipulation of popular Greek folklore and musical narrative. The project focuses on the role in which contemporary jewellery practices can re-interpret ideas of place and narratives of identity. This research establishes a personal ontology through re-imagined and reinvented micro-narratives, which investigate place as an impetus for creating jewellery objects.

This practice-based research project seeks to produce a body of work that highlights the symbolic interaction between the expansiveness of place and the plurality of identity, through both subjective and objective signifiers. Drawing from both personal and family repertoires, the project engages with politics, folklore and national identity, in order to decrypt and analyse facets of Greekness, through reconfiguring and reinventing a sense of place, manifested by and within a jewellery object.