Monika Strasser

Awarded

Monika Strasser

'Schattenbroschen'

Jewellery and Objects

Jury report

Reshaping heirlooms
How can one deal with one's own fam­ily his­tory? The de­signer Monika Strasser finds the start­ing-point for her jew­ellery cre­ations in some­thing that fills some peo­ple with pride and is a bur­den to oth­ers. The idea comes from meals shared at the fam­ily table: peo­ple argue and laugh, but they also quar­rel at this table, says Monika Strasser. She in­her­ited cut­lery from her fam­ily, and she now trans­forms it into very spe­cial jew­ellery items she calls 'Schat­ten­broschen' (shadow-brooches): you can't run away from fam­ily his­tory, says Monika Strasser, just as you can't shake off your shadow ei­ther.
These are amaz­ing items of jew­ellery: un­usu­ally shaped, and it is hard to work out what they are for at a first glance. Monika Strasser saws out the in­side upper parts of cut­lery han­dles so that only a frame re­mains. She fixes two of these frame-like struc­tures in sil­ver­plated metal one below the other at angle of about 30 de­grees; this pro­duces a shadow-brooch. A com­pan­ion piece at­taches the brooch to the in­side of the dress. When worn, the brooch casts a shadow on the fab­ric, hence the name. The set of four, called the 'Schat­ten­broschen-Fam­i­lie' (shadow-brooch fam­ily), is com­ple­mented by an­other kind of jew­ellery, called 'Schat­tenin­nen­broschen' (shadow in­ner-brooches). Here the in­ter­nal out­line of the shadow brooches is picked up and con­structed in gold.
The brooches are lov­ingly pre­sented in nos­tal­gic-look­ing baroque cases made of wood and fab­ric. Here again a game is being played with 'in praise of shadow': the shadow brooches are pre­sented like cut­lery and a shadow is stitched in to the fab­ric. Monika Strasser uses the phrase re­cy­cling his­tory for this tech­nique of ap­pro­pri­at­ing fam­ily his­tory cre­atively and re­shap­ing it by saw­ing it up and putting it to­gether again.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Monika Strasser
Geboren Né/Née en Nato/Nata in Born in
1976
Education
MA of Fine Arts, Jewellery and Corpus

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