New_York_Times_article

December 6, 2012

By FELICIA CRADDOCK

Jewelry That's More Than Wearable Art EDINBURGH — A cascade of ice-like stones, Wendy Ramshaw’s “Necklace for Marie Taglioni” was inspired by the 1940 work of the New York artist Joseph Cornell, “Taglioni’s jewel casket.”

The Cornell piece in turn paid homage to the ballerina Marie Taglioni who, according to legend, kept a cube of ice in her jewelry box to remind her of a night in 1835 when she had danced in the moonlight for a Russian highwayman, on a panther skin spread across a snowbound road.

Like much produced by Ms. Ramshaw in a 50year career, the resulting piece is more than jewelry; it is a work of art.

“There’s lots of hugely successful jewelers, but Wendy’s a step above,” said Christina Jansen, director of The Scottish Gallery, in Edinburgh, which has for the past 30 years been the launching pad for all of Ms. Ramshaw’s major shows.

“She’s in over 80 collections world-wide,” Ms. Jansen noted in a recent interview: “Her work has always been far more than just wearable art.”

In February the gallery will put on a new show of Ms. Ramshaw’s jewelry. Titled ‘The Inventor,’ the show will provide a journey through Ms. Ramshaw’s past collections, alongside some previously unseen pieces.

Drawn together by a narrative thread of photographs, notes, drawings and Ms. Ramshaw’s voluminous back catalogue of books, it has been timed to complement another show at the Edinburgh Dovecot Studios: ‘Rooms of Dreams.’ It will be a retrospective centered on the artist’s original ‘Room of Dreams’ — a critically acclaimed installation that first appeared at The Scottish Gallery in 2002.

A striking red and white chamber, the ‘Room of Dreams’ is a world of jewelry as art; hung in frames upon the walls or hidden within locked drawers that can be opened only by attendants bearing keys.

“It’s a very unusual exhibition, and it appeals to people who are not interested in jewelry,” Ms. Jansen said. “You read it as a piece of architecture. It’s a fantastic installation, its dreams, its imagination and so on.”

Populated by characters both real and imagined, Room of Dreams draws on a myriad tales, including “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Bluebeard,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”

Though these and other stories have appeared as inspiration throughout her career, Ms. Ramshaw insisted in a recent telephone interview that abstract forms and not narratives have been the basis of her life’s work.

“I’m fascinated by repeated forms,” she said. “And fascinated by forms which, although they may be different in scale and shape, have a similarity.”

“They’re everywhere, in man-made works and in nature,” Ms. Ramshaw added. “I’m sitting in a room where there are floorboards running in lines, and I’m looking at a fireplace that’s got tiles on it; squares, lines, everything is linear,” she said.

“I have a vocabulary of forms, which I use again and again. They come very instinctively to me. The most basic ones are a triangle, a square, an oblong and a circle, and combinations to those forms.”

Throughout her work, these variant forms interlock to produce a single, perfectly crafted whole that can be divided and rearranged to form equally well-crafted combinations of parts.

“I want the wearer to be able to wear things in a very simple manner and in a very complex manner,” Ms. Ramshaw said. “There are often many parts to a piece. The wearer decides on any given day or at any given time how to combine them.”

This is an idea she pioneered in the late 1960s, with now-iconic ring sets — a series of multiple rings, each of which fits with any or all of the others in its group.

Analyzed by an International Business Machines computer, one of her more elaborate sets, titled “White Queen,” a series of gold rings bearing the symbols of the crown and the scepter, was found to have an almost infinite number of potential combinations.

But it is more than just this capacity for metamorphosis that has brought Ms. Ramshaw’s ring sets renown.

Each is presented on a carefully shaped stand that is itself a work of art.

“When you’re not wearing them, they’re mounted on these beautiful little towers and they look like San Gimignano or something,” the art critic and author Lady Marina Vaizey said in a recent telephone interview.

Recounting a story that Ms. Ramshaw had once told her, she added, “She said a burglar just ignored them because they look like modernist works of art, as opposed to jewelry.”

Many would say that her pieces function as both. “They work on the human body and they work separately from it,” said LadyVaizey.

When worn as jewelry, the pieces seem somehow to come to life, as if the wearer enhances the jewelry as much as the jewelry enhances the wearer.

“She’s always been very interested in movement,” Lady Vaizey said. “A great deal of her jewelry — not so much her ring sets, but the earrings and so on — are designed to move very gently. The cascade of colors you get, even in the static ring sets, give a kind of vivacity, a sense of movement and life to her work.”

This liveliness may come in part from Ms. Ramshaw’s extensive repertoire of materials, including early work with paper and plastic, as well as to glass and gold. “The more you get into her work, there’s always something to seduce you,” said Ms. Jansen.“It’s a great career to celebrate.”