Most of us will have marvelled at some stage at the huge gold jewellery in the National Museum. The usual reaction is: how did people wear these pieces? There are necklaces made of gold spheres the size of tennis balls, and torcs - magnificent as they are - that look well-nigh impossible to wear without garotting yourself in the process. But whatever about the thought of fastening a brooch the size of a dinner-plate to your cape - what about jewellery that you cannot wear at all?
Currently running at DESIGNyard is a show called Attitude and Action - North American Figurative Jewelry. This is where the borders between jewellery and art become blurred: several of the pieces are designed to be looked at, not to be worn. It's the first time DESIGNyard has had such a big group show - some 73 jewellers - and the first time it has shown work from the US: all the jewellers are from the there or Canada. The show has travelled here from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.
Each of the jewellers has interpreted the theme of the human figure for their work, and the collective result is a fascinating exhibition that encompasses statements both personal and political. Christina Y. Smith's brooch She Wished It Could Stop is of a large, silver gallows with a woman lying atop it, and a spray can that looks like a bullet hanging from the gibbet. The gallows stands on a police tent. Her catalogue-notes explain the piece refers to a gangland shooting in LA "at a community park on a Sunday when families were around".
Bally Boris has a sequence of four brooches, based on various stages of pregnancy, which were inspired by the birth of his own child. They are very delicate pieces, made with yellow gold and precious stones - but whether you would want to go out for dinner wearing a brooch depicting the fusion of egg with sperm is a matter for yourself. The same with the gallows brooch - which would at any rate be likely to tear a hole in your lapel, given its weight. There are other pieces which seem to be there purely for the crack, such as the enormous Disney Cinderella tin bangle, which is the size of a biscuit tin, with a tiny opening for a wrist in its centre. "This bracelet is not intended to be worn," writes its creator, Harriete Estel Berman, helpfully. "Can we squeeze into an ideal that does not conform? The wrist-hole is intentionally very small as a commentary on fashion and the concept of `One Size Fits All'."
Then there is Barbara Walter's Wedding Bells Ring Toy. A wedding-ring with a difference. This ring sits on a tiny car, on one side, the hasps are female legs, on the other, male. Atop all this is a large, frosted wedding cake, with a tiny silver couple. The cake-tiers rotate.
One of the outstanding pieces of the show is a Degas Bracelet by the artist ROY. Made of small, silver-rimmed panels, and more traditional in form than some of the other exhibits, it superbly crafted, and created specially for this show. A row of Degas's famous ballerinas bend to tie the ribbons of their shoes, and the outline of their snowflake-type tutus forms the bracelet's edge. A diamond winks on the bracelet's hasp. "My one-of-a-kinds are `reinventions'," ROY explains with confident modesty. Melaine R. Bilenker's Embrace is a small, cutaway oval brooch, in the shape and colour of a robin's egg, with two arms bent within, one male, one female. It is deceptively and beguilingly simple. You look at it once, then twice. Are the arms touching? Is this a modern equivalent of the Victorian hair brooch, where strands of hair from both husband and wife were entwined and cased in jet? Is that texture meant to look like eggshell? Then you read the materials list, and, with a shock, see eggshell on it.
Bilenker has used silver, stainless steel, bone, and eggshell for this exquisite piece, of which she says: "The true stories of our lives are made up of the smaller details, the shadows no-one notices. This brooch alludes to the embrace, yet the arms do not touch, as if they just had or soon will. I have captured a fleeting gesture by rendering its image as a tender object to be worn on the body, to be held close." Forget the icy glitter of diamond rings. This beautiful, delicate brooch is what romance is all about.
By contrast, Tess Rickard's piece, Plea- sure and Pain is a deliberately aggressive exhibit. A fetish-like woman figure, made of resin and filled with sharp tacks and nails, her legs being two steel spikes and her head composed of found objects, is suspended by the neck from a thick silver coil. The woman figure is the size of a fat Barbie doll, if such a paradoxical creature ever existed. The more you look at it, the more it resembles a used voodoo doll. Wear this, and any acquaintances you meet in the pub are most unlikely to mess with you.
Bilenker's piece is on loan from a private collection, as are about 20 of the pieces in the show. The rest are for sale, the prices mean most will probably end up in museums, rather than jewellery boxes. You can buy Bally Boris's four-brooch sequence of his baby's conception and growth for £6,700. The Cinderella unwearable bracelet is £825. The Wedding Bells Ring Toy is £3,700. The fetish piece is £2,055.
Marian Stanley of DESIGNyard hopes the exhibition will give Irish-based jewellers an opportunity to see what their contemporaries are creating elsewhere. "You look at this show and realise that European jewellers mostly make pieces to be worn, whereas the American and Canadian jewellers make a lot of straight art; things you couldn't possibly wear." Stanley hopes that the general non-jewellery making, but jewellery-wearing public will want to come to view this unusual show. Leave your ideas about what you think jewellery is at the door and come in to marvel, grimace, and laugh.
Attitude and Action: North American Figu- rative Jewelry, runs at DESIGNyard, Temple Bar, until 21st October. Admission free.