Su san Cohn
sec­ond thoughts

Water, oil, blood, air and waste: the mate­ri­als fea­tured by jew­eller Susan Cohn in sec­ond thoughts. Amongst the items of waste are mate­ri­als that have lain around Cohn’s work­shop left­overs from pre­vi­ous jew­ellery lines, new­ly resurrected.

The use of such mate­ri­als facil­i­tates the artist’s explo­ration of the mean­ing of pre­cious in a cul­ture crit­i­cal­ly con­cerned with dwin­dling resources and the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the envi­ron­ment. The ques­tion is raised: how may the crit­i­cal real­i­ty of what is new­ly rare and vul­ner­a­ble in our soci­ety be trans­lat­ed into an emo­tion­al motif as with gold or dia­monds? Cohn intro­duces the sash as the form of adorn­ment by which the New Pre­cious may be kept close and inte­grat­ed across the dis­cours­es of every­day life. The appear­ance of the sash reminds us that beau­ty, too, is a pre­cious com­mod­i­ty. For Cohn, inter­ro­ga­tions of the cul­tur­al ideals of beau­ty and pre­cious­ness pro­vide the modus operan­di by which she reflects crit­i­cal­ly on her own craft and on con­tem­po­rary jew­ellery. The restrained scale of the exhi­bi­tion, as well as the return to tra­di­tion­al and eth­nic ideas of crafts­man­ship, cre­ate a sense of appre­hen­sion in the work. This is only resolved by the expres­sion of ideas that point at a new approach to jew­ellery-mak­ing: the accent lies on the ways in which jew­ellery is lived and pre­cious­ness comes into focus.

The reha­bil­i­ta­tion of beau­ty as a focal issue, and the use of beau­ty to enhance rather than obstruct the mean­ing in Cohn’s sec­ond thoughts pro­voke renewed think­ing on the rela­tion­ship between beau­ty and insight in con­tem­po­rary craft.

Michael Falk