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Treating Gold Rudely
| Article
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19739 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
1,755 Words |
| Author
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Karen S. Chambers
Karen S. Chambers is a craft writer, critic, and curator
currently based in New York. |
You think: glorious, exquisite, mesmerizing when you look at William Harper's jewelry. His work makes you think: common, crude, and off-putting. You could add monumental, assertive, blatantly sexual as well as human-scaled, restrained, and obscure.
The materials that he works with are equally contradictory and yet complementary: gold, silver, and lead; pearls, jade, and his brother's wisdom teeth; enamels formulated by the Royal Academy in London and red plastic reflectors. Exquisitely set in a gold bezel, an expensive opal or an iridescent carapace of a beetle found near his Tallahassee home could be the focal point. His titles are also provocative: The Archangel Shiva Sebastian, Kabuki Boogie, Self-Portrait of the Artist as an Icon.
There's a lot to see and to think about in a Harper brooch or pendant and that's the way Harper likes it: "I love Oriental rugs and Persian miniatures because no matter how long you study them or look at them, you can't remember every thing you've seen."
In his own work, he is "trying to make the kind of art that the more you look, the more you see." For the last decade and a half, Harper has been making memorable, visually and conceptually complex jewelry that challenges our view of what jewelry is, creating an oeuvre remarkable for its richness in all senses.
Through a succession of series, he has explored a variety of themes. Their titles reveal their range: Pagan Babies (from a friend's childhood memories of the Catholic nuns requesting contributions to save the "pagan babies" of the Third World; Saints, Martyrs, and Savages; Fleurs du Mal, inspired by Baudelaire; Fake Maharajahs, the White Hermaphrodite, and Other Baroque Grotesqueries. He uses themes that one writer has summed up as "sex, death, and religion," issues unlikely to be explored in jewelry.
The constant in all of Harper's work has been a fascination with duality. He easily reels off some of the dichotomies he has explored: "Beauty versus ugliness, crude versus refined, precious versus nonprecious, male versus female, light versus dark." While these can be considered as opposites, they are also complements that when taken together form a whole.
An Alligator Tooth
The best example of this in the artist's estimation is The Androgyne of 1986. He
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