Emma Tempelman Jewellery

Emma Tempelman

This site is an online portfolio consisting of my practical work I have done thus far.

Artists Bio

In 2019 I graduated my Bachelors of Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa.In 2022 I graduated my Masters of Visual Arts (Cum Laude) from Sint Lucas School of Arts, Antwerpen, Belgium.This website is a detailed catalogue of the collections I made for my Bachelors final year praxis, and the work I made in my Masters.

Masters Collection
(2022)

Info
Gallery

The natural world has a large impact on the way in which humans exist, the same could be said vice versa. This is exactly why I chose the Anthropocene as the starting point for my body of work. The Anthropocene is the earth’s current geological time period and it deals with the earths ecosystems that are altered by the human influence. When looking at the earths ecosystems there are many different contributors, the one I will be focusing on is one of the most overlooked and most important contributors to our ecosystem; fungi. Fungus plays an important role in energy cycling within, and between, ecosystems and are part of a diverse community of “decomposers” that break down dead natural organisms.The way I would like to incorporate the idea of fungi into my work is through abstraction. Abstraction is the process of taking away or removing characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics. By using this technique, the objects being created won’t be directly linked to fungus and mushrooms, but rather my own interpretation of them as subjects of inspiration for my body of work. I aim to alter the raw forms found in fungi into re-imagined pieces. These pieces will emulate funguses elaborate and diverse manifestation. In that sense, this project will be aimed not as a replication, but a glorification of the kingdom of fungi and the beauty that may be found in even the most seemingly mundane of subjects. The reason I have chosen to work with abstraction is the fact that the natural world has been altered by the human race, and that is exactly what the Anthropocene is about.Jewellery is the most suitable medium for this project as it is capable of being worn on the human body. By wearing jewellery one can choose to alter how one looks, so I aim for my pieces to be confrontational and start up a conversation and be an educational tool as to how we as humans can improve and change, to better preserve the natural world around us.

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The research for my Masters began with the topic of trend forecasting in Fashion, something I have been very interested in the last couple of years. While doing this research and gaining more knowledge on the topic I learnt that every fashion year has 2 main seasons and every season is subdivided into 3 main concepts or style-aesthetics. This is something that can be tracked and be seen a few seasons/years in advance. I quickly learnt that this was a too broad spectrum to do the research on for my Masters’ project and decided to narrow down my field of research. What I found as a common subject in the past and years to come is the topic of sustainability, so I made the choice to focus a bit more on that as a subjectfocussed on that as a subject.While doing my research on sustainable brands and designers in this field I came across a few who were researching and working with mycelium based materials and thought this would be something interesting for myself to do more in depth research on. Mycelium, the fungal equivalent of roots in plants, has been identified as an ecologically friendly substitute to a litany of materials throughout different industries, including but not limited to packaging, fashion and building materials. The Kingdom of Fungi is something that has interested and amazed me for as long as I can remember so this was a perfect source of inspiration and path for me to take on. My initial idea was to use this material and make jewellery pieces with it, but as I did more research on the mycelium materials and got into contact with people working with and on this material, I found that it would be impossible to use this material on the small scale I needed to make the jewellery pieces wearable, which for me is a very important aspect of jewellery making.After hitting a roadblock in my process, I had to make a shift in what I was doing, so I decided to move away from using fungi as the material inspiration for my jewellery pieces but rather now focus solely on the visual aspects of fungi to inspire and guide my design process. This collection is visually inspired by and designed around mushrooms and the underground interwoven mycelium network we as humans don’t get to see. With this collection I wanted to give the feeling that my jewellery is growing on you as you walk throw a forest and come into contact with the fungi.I stayed true to my previous technical education and while designinged and manufacturmanufacturinged a collection of couture (occasion wear) and prêt-à-porter (everyday wear) jewellery pieces in traditional techniques and material (i.e. silver).