Serious play: the jewellery of Lin Cheung
Jeweller Lin Cheung is shaking up tradition, and “…her subversive reinterpretation of familiar, hackneyed forms makes us smile and rethink our relationship to jewellery and its place in our lives…” says writer Rachel Church.
Jewellery can function in so many different ways – as a sign of wealth, a beautiful art object or as a way to reflect the world and express the wearer’s beliefs or identity. Lin Cheung’s jewellery asks questions of us: What is jewellery? What is it for? What does it do for us and how do we respond to it? For her, jewels are communicative objects, items we hold close and help us to explore the world or which express the reality of a relationship – like a ring which stands in for a marriage or love affair, or a locket which holds the image or hair of a friend or lover. Her work is notable for the simplicity of its forms, a return to archetypal forms of jewellery – brooches, pendants, necklaces – but often with a twist, a ring the size of a bangle, or a locket which can never open.
Her life in jewellery began with a B.A. in Wood, Metal, Ceramics and Plastics at the University of Brighton, where reading The New Jewelry by Ralph Turner opened her eyes to the possibilities offered by jewellery as a form of expression and art. It was followed by a year as a Bishopsland resident, one of 200 young jewellers and silversmiths who have been supported by the Trust to become independent makers. A Master of Arts in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Arts came next. Graduation was followed by a series of exhibitions and awards, beginning with the 1996 Royal Mint Medal Design Prize and the 1997 Goldsmiths’ Company Award for Jewellery and most recently as the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Françoise van den Bosch Award, named after the Dutch jewellery designer and presented bi-annually to a jeweller of international standing chosen by an independent jury.
Lin graduated in 1997 from the Royal Collage of Art with an MA in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery. She has received many accolades including the Françoise van den Bosch Award and the Herbert Hofmann Award, both in 2018. Her work is in many global collections, including Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Contemporary Art Society, London, UK; The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, among others.
Collaborative projects and teaching have also been important parts of her life. She is currently the Reader in Jewellery at Central Saint Martins, London and explains that teaching is a huge part of her life and time, ‘it gives me a chance to explore a subject that I love and that I’m fascinated by… I find it a source of inspiration, it keeps me on my toes for my own practice, makes me open-minded and offers moments of discovery but sometimes anxiety and frustration teaching and learning jewellery in the contemporary world’. She has also worked with institutions and large events. Designing the medals for the London 2012 Paralympic Games, based on a detail of a cast of a classical statue of Nike, was a project linking the British Museum curatorial and conservation departments as well as the digital and physical craftspeople at the Royal Mint who created the medal itself. Projects such as the 2011 Pas de Deux project united Cheung and fellow artist Laura Potter, MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), the Museumaker collective and members of the public to create unique pieces of jewellery and associated materials which were shared between MIMA and the project participants.
Making and re-making
Lin is interested in language – the names she gives her jewels add another layer or bring out their meaning – and in exploring the language used in jewellery. Her Rope of Pearls project explored the perhaps hackneyed form of the pearl necklace, making it into a literal rope, to be draped around the neck and dividing it up according to the names used to market different necklace lengths, the matinée, collar, choker or princess.
Breath/ Breathe sees a poem by the French poet Paul Eluard etched onto the surface of an un-openable locket, to be revealed by breathing on the silver, creating an object which keeps its meaning close to the heart.
Projects such as the 2007 Room Temperature explore the words used for physical and emotional temperatures in a silver thermometer which links foul temper with stormy conditions and draws out the connections between the words used for internal moods and those for external weather.
Her practice is characterised by a willingness to reuse and remake objects, retaining the emotional importance of the object even if the form is completely transformed. An early piece entitled Siblings unites four broken or discarded chains belonging to Cheung and her siblings into a single necklace.
In 2012, a project inspired by convict love tokens, coins which were smoothed and engraved with messages of love and farewell by people who were being transported to Australia, saw her making her own pennies out of her personal jewellery which she melted and made into roughly formed pennies. The gold she used ranged from 1 to 24 carats and the different colours of the pennies hold the memory of the jewellery they came from.
Memory and reuse were part of the inspiration for a series of carved pearl necklaces, starting with a necklace she had been given by her mother but which had never felt like something she wanted to wear or felt suited her. Carving the pearls was partly a technical exercise – could it be done? – but also a way to reclaim the pearls and question their association with a stereotyped femininity. Asking a male friend to model it was not an explicit exploration of gender, she says, ‘the idea of putting it on a male body rather than a female body was maybe to represent that change in a gendered object. Pearls are sometimes associated with particularly feminine women and views of them, so there was a bigger conversation about pearls in that sense. It was done quite a few years ago and in a way, the discourse and discussion about gender has grown and become a lot more public.’
Thinking in stone
Her work took a new direction in 2014 when she attended a five day stone carving workshop with Charlotte de Syllas, the doyenne of hardstone jewellery carving. Staff development funding from Central Saint Martins gave her the opportunity and time to try a new skill, as she explains: ‘I thought, I could go somewhere and learn something new. I didn’t have any expectations. Charlotte is very generous as a person and hugely knowledgeable… she let us loose on her machines and there was this feeling of discovery and it was a lot of fun.’ After the workshop, she began to acquire and adapt equipment and tools to continue experimenting with stone.
Working in stone was a completely new experience for her – her work had not previously used gemstones or stone materials and the workshop opened a window of discovery onto a new world of possibilities. She enjoyed the experience of being a beginner and the sense of newness and learning it brought. As she says ‘if you just have a go at something, you can more or less get close to what you want to achieve. A lot of it was, what I didn’t know didn’t worry me. I just went for it.’ Teaching herself informally through books, YouTube videos and advice from other makers gave her the freedom to experiment and learn through trial and error. Part of the process was learning about the live nature of stone and how faults and inclusions change the way in which it can be worked. Re-carving stone objects she found in charity shops and at auction was an accessible way to begin – the marble and onyx ornaments and ashtrays which have passed out of fashion offered material in which the colour, transparency and inclusions were easier to see than when bought in the rough. She grew to find the unpredictability a source of delight, ‘you can be more in the moment with stone carving than anything else I’ve experienced in my life…you have to go with that piece of stone and accept it, if it doesn’t go the way you want. It’s quite liberating, really.’
‘If you just have a go at something, you can more or less get close to what you want to achieve. A lot of it was, what I didn’t know didn’t worry me. I just went for it.’Tweet this
Lin Cheung’s place on the shortlist for the 2017 BBC Woman’s Hour Craft Prize, organised with the participation of the Crafts Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum, brought her work to an even wider audience. Her hand carved brooches responded to the great political and social upheaval of British life in 2016, the decision to leave the European Union after 47 years of membership. The series was subsequently part of the work for which she was awarded the prestigious Herbert Hofmann Prize at the 2018 Schmuck jewellery fair in Munich.
The Delayed Reactions series began as a single brooch, which she had intended for herself, but expanded into a group of 45 jewels, using different hardstones to reflect moods and ideas about the political and social changes in Europe and the United States around the time of the Brexit referendum. Pieces shown in the Woman’s Hour exhibition used lapis lazuli to reflect the same azure blue of the European Union flag which she inlaid with small gold stars. The titles Confused, Speechless and Fallen suggest a rueful yet unexpectedly humorous response to events – a personal response and attempt to work through the unfolding events. Although the referendum and its aftermath was characterised by frenetic public discourse and the agitation of social media, stone carving is essentially a slow art. Carving the brooches gave Cheung the space and time to think through her responses and give voice to her feelings of confusion and sadness. The form she chose was that of a pin badge – an object which is typically cheap and often mass produced, a quick response to a fluid situation- the very antithesis to the time required for working with stone.
Although the slow nature of stoneworking was initially challenging, she came to feel it was an advantage. ‘It became a positive thing. In terms of making the series of badges, I realised that the ideas and the meanings behind them were all sort of built into the whole process of stone carving. I didn’t call it Delayed Reactions by accident, it was very knowing by the time I chose it. I didn’t start out with that title and the idea of making a whole series of badges about leaving the EU and what I thought about it. It all happened in that process of trying to get my head around the material and learning about it. I didn’t have the right tools to begin with but the difficulty allowed time for me to absorb and follow events and just for some of that to come through into the making, so if it was quick and easier, I would have captured it in a different way.’
What will the future offer?
‘I think that the idea of the badges as they are now, particularly the ones which respond to current events, they came to a natural end.’ says Cheung, ‘But the form of the pin badge and the materials – there’s probably a lot more to explore. I’d like to explore the form more and the mechanisms and other ways that the object would communicate in subtle, nuanced ways – it may not be about anything current, it might be about wearing…the meaning of wearing something you take out into the world.’ Whatever direction her work takes next, it will be unexpected and keep us thinking about jewellery, its place in the world and our own.
Written by Rachel Church | Photography used with kind permission of Lin Cheung