ENGRAM: Holding memories in the hand | HerCanberra

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ENGRAM: Holding memories in the hand

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Rings are objects that we buy to hold our memories, that sit on our hands to remind us of moments and pledges.

There is nothing more beautiful than an old person’s hand, wearing a worn and loved ring with a story to tell.

Swiss-born, Canberra-based contemporary jeweller Sabine Pagan has captured this feeling with a twist in a series of prints within her latest exhibition at Craft ACT. Site specific (2016) shows an aged hand modelling a stunning composition of cubes of gold, the deliberately worn and scratched metal’s surface complementing beautiful lines and wrinkles.

Sabine Pagan, Bathing Light III, 2014, sterling silver, monel, patinated copper, pyrope garnets. Photography by Grant Hancock.

Engrams are memory traces, detailed memory images held by our brains. Pagan’s rings in this stunning exhibition hold all kinds of remembered details: landscapes, architecture and history.

Her pieces of jewellery are small sculptures which ride boldly on the hand. Pagan works in series and mixes a variety of metals with sometimes surprising feature materials. One series (Site Lines, 2008) is suited up with grey and black pinstripes, another (Annexe, 2009) incorporates bright orange cubes of anodised aluminium. Chunks of gneiss rock from Vals Valley in Switzerland, an area famous for its geological origins and its fantastic thermal spa, is featured in a new series of the valley’s name.

Sabine Pagan, In (out) between, 2011, sterling silver (also heat treated), monel. Photography by Grant Hancock.

Pagan also offers a seductive series of wall works and brooches called Nocturne (2018), dark disks made of hammered steel. The process of making, says Pagan, is deeply connected to memory. She no longer thinks about ‘how to hammer’, her body remembers how from years of doing. The physicality of her making process is not hidden by her long experience as a jewellery artisan, but rather revealed, and each piece holds and shares these traces, to be treasured.

Sabine Pagan will be speaking about her work at a lunchtime floor talk at Craft ACT on Saturday 16 June at 1 pm.

the essentials 

What: ENGRAM: Sabine Pagan
When: 10 May – 30 June 2018. Open Tues-Fridays 10-5, Saturdays 12-4
Where: Craft ACT, Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit, Civic

Feature image: Sabine Pagan, Site Specific, print, 2016. Photography by Grant Hancock.

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