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Monika Strasser

Awarded

Monika Strasser

'Back to the roots – Erbstücke und andere Familiengeschichten'

Jewellery and Objects

Jury report

Family tales and other stories
Fam­ily sto­ries are the cen­tral theme of Monika Strasser's work. She has been de­sign­ing brooches and rings made up of set pieces from in­her­ited and found sil­ver cut­lery for years. She won the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Grant for eight 'Shadow Brooches' as part of the main theme heir­looms in 2005. This year the jew­ellery de­signer has pre­sented new 'Heir­looms' and two other col­lec­tions. The last two could be read as fur­ther de­vel­op­ments of the col­lec­tion called 'Back to the roots – heir­looms and other fam­ily sto­ries'.
For the 'Heir­looms', Monika Strasser saws the or­na­ments off the cut­lery han­dles and moulds them in wax. She then uses these wax parts to as­sem­ble new struc­tures, and casts them in sil­ver. The tree-like brooches and rings de­signed in this way are the 'Heir­looms'. They are rem­i­nis­cent of frag­ments of fam­ily trees. The jew­ellery de­signer calls this process her sym­bolic in­ter­ven­tion into fam­ily his­tory. She re­assem­bles it. The brooches and rings look like lov­ing or­na­ments at first glance, but on closer con­sid­er­a­tion you can see that they are not per­fect, just like fam­ily sto­ries in real life. A sec­ond step is to wrap some of these struc­tures in gold-coloured thread. Now it is not pos­si­ble to see what is un­der­neath. Monika Strasser never mixes two dif­fer­ent or­na­ments to form a sin­gle piece of jew­ellery. The in­di­vid­ual items al­ways re­main true to a fam­ily tree. Even so we find two dif­fer­ent arrange­ments in these works: some­times the or­na­ments fol­low a strict geom­e­try and the brooches and rings are rem­i­nis­cent of ice crys­tals. Then again they seem to have grown or­gan­i­cally and freely, and are more rem­i­nis­cent of a lit­tle branch.
The brooches in the 'Ben­gel Col­lec­tion' came into being dur­ing Monika Strasser's pe­riod as 'Artist in Res­i­dence' in Ida-Ober­stein in Ger­many. They are based on the same prin­ci­ple as the 'Heir­looms'. She did not use cut­lery as the start­ing ma­te­r­ial, but chain links pro­duced by the J. Ben­gel chain and jew­ellery fac­tory, a fam­ily busi­ness that has now closed. For the 'Stone Brooches' in pyrites the de­signer ac­cepts the story as it is. These pieces say: 'We be­long to­gether de­spite the rough edges.'
Ar­i­ana Pradal

Biography

Monika Strasser
Born in
1976
Education
MA of Fine Arts, Jewellery and Corpus

also in

2005

2010

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