Manon van Kouswijk

After being trained as a goldsmith, Manon van Kouswijk studied jewellery in art school and graduated in 1995 from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where she worked later on as Head of the Jewellery Department from 2007-2010.

In 2010 she relocated to Melbourne, Australia, where she has set up her studio and is currently working in a partime position as coordinator of the Jewellery Studio and Lecturer at Monash University Faculty of Art & Design.

Manon is interested in the universal qualities of jewellery and other personal objects, the value and meaning they represent and the different roles they have in exchanges between people as gifts, souvenirs, heirlooms. In her work she makes aspects of the way we use and handle things visible in the objects themselves. Her working methods are quite elaborate and obsessive, ranging from making pearlchains of paper archive stickers on a thread and cutting butterflies out of mass-produced domestic objects to embroidering stains on table cloths. Subject matter and type of object usually define the chosen material and technique.

Her work is exhibited in galleries and museums and is part of private and public collections worldwide including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Netherlands / Stedelijk Museum Den Bosch, the Netherlands / Dutch Textile Museum, Tilburg, the Netherlands / Foundation Françoise van den Bosch, the Netherlands / Røsska Museet Gøteborg Sweden / FNAC, Paris, France / NGV, Melbourne, Australia / Art Gallery of South Australia / MUDAC, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Manon van Kouswijk has been awarded the famous Southern Way McClelland Commission 2021 for her dynamic sculpture proposal ‘Peninsula Pearls’, to be installed in September 2021.

PRESS:

Manon van kouswijk: the possibility of someone, metalsmith magazine, 2018/19

To coincide with the Design Museum's survey show Unexpected Pleasures: The Art and Design of Contemporary Jewellery, GALLERY S O London presents Chamber of Wonder.

While the term 'cultural resistance' has become synonymous with the world of social sciences in the 1970s, new energies emerged elsewhere. From the sub, counter and resistance cultures exciting developments in contemporary jewellery blossomed and a fresh identifiable movement among designers and makers of the day was born. The work asked questions about the cultural meanings of gender, material value and the intimate relationship between the object and body. Wearable pieces were made to rethink social rituals and stereotypes and queried the notion of how and why we adorn ourselves.

Following in the spirit of this movement Chamber of Wonder shows the work of current designer makers united by their irreverence of traditional notions of luxury jewellery and a curiosity for reinterpreting objects found and fashioned to wear. From Bernhard Schobinger's choker of hexagon rock crystal slabs linked with fine gold to Hans Stofer's renovated skipping rope necklace with timeworn handles, or David Bielander's silky, silver garlic bulb pendant, the works in the show celebrate the diverse expressions of the genre and offer fresh alternatives to the 'proper' function of jewellery.