Remains to be seen, worn and heard. An inquiry into anthropogenic debris investigated through contemporary jewellery objects

This research project explores the negative environmental impacts of anthropogenic debris by investigating these found materials within the medium of contemporary jewellery objects.

Contemporary jewellery objects are a powerful artistic medium. We can wear jewellery on our bodies and carry it with us. Jewellery can sit on or through the body, and at the same time extend beyond our bodies. Jewellery objects can resonate their own space, to be watched, observed publicly or privately, inviting the wearer or voyeur to think, to enquire, to remember and to investigate. Jewellery objects arouse curiosity, can whisper, shout out or call irresistibly to be touched or held. Or these jewellery objects can speak without words in a universal language.

As contemporary jewellery objects, they offer a new way in which to present the serious global issue of anthropogenic debris both marine and land-based. This selected interactive medium offers more than words, spreadsheets or diagrams on what has become an area of global scientific investigation, with current information on the quantities and distribution of anthropogenic debris across Australia limited and inconclusive.

This project enables a personal collection of data from an Australian perspective that would traditionally be presented within the scientific community, to be shared with the jewellery community and wider general public as a three-dimensional research project. It allows this personal investigation to highlight how what we discard on a daily basis travels far and wide, impacting the environment, and therefore ourselves.

This research is about ordinary, everyday materials presented to all who use and discard them. Through a body of work constructed entirely from discarded anthropogenic marine and land-based materials collected along Victorian, New South Wales and Western Australia coastal environs, this research aims to re-engage ourselves with the objects we use and discard on a daily basis to highlight these unsustainable ecological concerns.

This project explores material and conceptual relationships between natural and built environs to form connections to and an understanding of where we reside within them, and how the influx of anthropogenic materials in the form of contemporary jewellery objects might incite references to natural places in lieu of natural materials traditionally associated with these areas as a second nature with underlying ecological concerns.

This research seeks to offer conceptual contemplation within a body of work constructed entirely with anthropogenic debris as discarded materials that are subject to negative connotations, how they present themselves as a reflection of our material culture and as the heirlooms of our past, present and future, as remains to be seen, worn and heard.