Pamela Ritchie – Artist Statement
Jewellery can perform as a provocateur or jester. It can add joy to life, empowering the wearer through an emotion, a potent idea or a visual stimulus that they respond to. And, it can provoke challenging conversations when worn or on display—a dialogue between the object, wearer and audience.
Jewellery can also generate bi-directional energy, both expanding the viewer’s own world (centrifugal) and drawing them into the intimate world of the small-scale/diminutive object (centripetal).
Thus we find a paradox that an abundance of ideas, form and pattern can be encapsulated in very small objects such as jewellery. The result is that even thoughts as expansive and elusive as dreams can be captured in something tiny and intricate.
Each series that I develop creates its own world, drawn from a particular set of ideas. Within each of those worlds, there is an inner consistency of materials, techniques and visual characteristics.
That combination of diversity and consistency allows each piece to both stand alone, and work together as a unified artistic expression rooted in a richness of causes and effects.
And for me, that richness is in itself an expression of beauty that is far more compelling than any conventional canon.