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Julie Usel

Awarded

Julie Usel

Jewellery series

Jewellery and Objects

Jury report

Appearance and reality
Julie Usel's award-win­ning works all cen­tre around the theme of 'pearls', 'pearl neck­lace'. She fans out the dif­fer­ent tra­di­tional con­no­ta­tions of a pearl neck­lace – mid­dle-class sta­tus sym­bol, clas­sic women's jew­ellery, ap­pear­ance and re­al­ity – while at the same time un­der­min­ing them by ex­per­i­ment­ing with ma­te­ri­als and tech­niques that ob­vi­ously don't fit this image.
From a dis­tance it looks like a real pearl neck­lace. If one touches it, one is star­tled by the un­usual feel: one is hold­ing a weight­less neck­lace made of shaped cel­lo­phane pearls in one's hand. At a first glance the way it is made sug­gests a life­like ma­te­r­ial qual­ity, on closer ex­am­i­na­tion, how­ever, it turns out to be an ironic twist. This am­bi­gu­ity, this mo­ment when the view shifts (the un­trans­lat­able French phrase 'mise en abîme' best cap­tures this), is often found in Julie Usel's work; it does, how­ever, not limit it­self to the hu­mor­ous ges­ture, but al­ways of­fers a vi­able and par­tic­u­larly in­di­vid­ual al­ter­na­tive to the orig­i­nal ob­ject, the pearl neck­lace. She ex­per­i­ments with dif­fer­ent ma­te­ri­als; from the above men­tioned cel­lo­phane to sil­i­cone, from al­abaster to porce­lain.
The sil­i­cone neck­lace is a work you ap­proach slowly. She de­lib­er­ately chooses a peel­ing process, where you cau­tiously dis­cover the jew­ellery. One pa­tiently de­taches the styl­ized pearl neck­lace, milled out with a laser, from a kind of sil­i­con leaf, and then gets hold of it.
Julie Usel con­trols has mas­tered the art of sub­tly shift­ing our per­cep­tions and views, and makes a tongue-in-cheek ref­er­ence back to the pearl neck­lace. This shift in per­cep­tion in re­la­tion to weight, den­sity and value touches upon the issue of our re­la­tion­ship to jew­ellery in a tan­gi­ble, fo­cussed and sus­tain­able man­ner.
Pa­trizia Criv­elli

Biography

Julie Usel
Born in
1982
Education
designer en bijou-objet et accessoires

Web

www.julieusel.net

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