Lost In Jewellery Magazine
presents the last artwork of artist Ruudt Peters 'NEBULA' exhibited at Galerie Rob Koudijs in Amsterdam from the 31st of October till the end of December 2020 !
NEBULA
It started with a story of Fog, a bounding bike ride to school one early morning rushing past, or rushing through. Frozen figures protruding from the grey mist, the viscosity of the air palpable. Both memory and sensation, an attempt to grasp at the fog, inside the fog. The elusive space held in our cupped hands as we dip them down into the misty air to grab what we see plainly. The vacuum, the absence, the space for things to be, but also not. In Nebula, we see glass shells as one hand, and silver as the other, cupping hollow spaces where white protrusions and recessions shift and move as you travel past, by, near, close, over, under, and away – from them. Sibling to the works Interno and MA, Peters’ once more addresses the space for the viewer and the wearer. However, unlike the ‘objectness’ of those bodies of work, the shell, the depths, these pieces are not the ‘form.’ It is the space inside, held between hands of silver and glass, and the light, landscape, and the figures inhabiting the brume.
When writing about Nebula, its difficult to write about anything solid, even though what these objects are is just that. I find myself writing about breath. Something elusive, but part of us and often overlooked. Let us hold our breath as we ride alongside Peters that morning. Feel the space in us fill up and inhale and hold between breaths. For a moment, Peters punctures the notions of I, you, me, we, here, then, and now, slamming all into a hierarchy that betrays our notions of self and asks us to inhale, hold, then exhale, returning us back into our bodies. Ruudt’s newest works of Nebula do something artworks often fail to do, take a trite notion, overly romantic and aspirational in its attempt, life, and humble us into simple worlds, simple moments in glass and silver, where the piece is not the point, but merely a vehicle for the unattainable nebula we surround ourselves with every day.
Aaron Decker
Photo 'Nebula', Conor Vella
presents the last artwork of artist Ruudt Peters 'NEBULA' exhibited at Galerie Rob Koudijs in Amsterdam from the 31st of October till the end of December 2020 !
NEBULA
It started with a story of Fog, a bounding bike ride to school one early morning rushing past, or rushing through. Frozen figures protruding from the grey mist, the viscosity of the air palpable. Both memory and sensation, an attempt to grasp at the fog, inside the fog. The elusive space held in our cupped hands as we dip them down into the misty air to grab what we see plainly. The vacuum, the absence, the space for things to be, but also not. In Nebula, we see glass shells as one hand, and silver as the other, cupping hollow spaces where white protrusions and recessions shift and move as you travel past, by, near, close, over, under, and away – from them. Sibling to the works Interno and MA, Peters’ once more addresses the space for the viewer and the wearer. However, unlike the ‘objectness’ of those bodies of work, the shell, the depths, these pieces are not the ‘form.’ It is the space inside, held between hands of silver and glass, and the light, landscape, and the figures inhabiting the brume.
When writing about Nebula, its difficult to write about anything solid, even though what these objects are is just that. I find myself writing about breath. Something elusive, but part of us and often overlooked. Let us hold our breath as we ride alongside Peters that morning. Feel the space in us fill up and inhale and hold between breaths. For a moment, Peters punctures the notions of I, you, me, we, here, then, and now, slamming all into a hierarchy that betrays our notions of self and asks us to inhale, hold, then exhale, returning us back into our bodies. Ruudt’s newest works of Nebula do something artworks often fail to do, take a trite notion, overly romantic and aspirational in its attempt, life, and humble us into simple worlds, simple moments in glass and silver, where the piece is not the point, but merely a vehicle for the unattainable nebula we surround ourselves with every day.
Aaron Decker
Photo 'Nebula', Conor Vella
Insight into NEBULA
Insight into NEBULA
What sparked your making of NEBULA and why does it feel important to be making this work now?
What sparked? I was making circles, searching for the fade away. Something that is both there and not there. The most important thing in the beginning was graveyards. They’re not the same in America as they are here because America has not existed for as long. Here the stones fade away with time and you can no longer make out the image. For a moment I was creating images about fading away but then the work became not only about the graveyards but also about space and air. It went from black to white, my focus on graveyards was put on hold. Slowly, I started an investigation of light.
I go back to my childhood when I was 10 years old, I had to bike 10 KM every morning and evening through rain and sun.The most exciting moments were when I biked through the fog. It is crazy, the very strong feeling of being in nothing, alone in nothing. Everything became silent, it was really zero. This feeling came back to me when I was walking for 4 hours in the mist in Japan. I was walking in “nowhere”, trees and water basins plopped up and disappeared. I had the feeling that I was walking in a dream.
When you speak in the mist and the fog it absorbs all of your noise and sounds to completely nothing. That's what I really tried to capture and slowly something started.
Producing a new body of work amidst a global pandemic is a fantastic feat.
Were you at all influenced by the current events unfolding or were your investigations in NEBULA a separate and personal endeavor?
Three fourths of the work was already done, but covid came up and made it a strange situation. Koen, my assistant, worked in the studio for 2 days while I would be at my summer studio, when I worked in the Amsterdam studio he would not be there. We never saw each other but would communicante over zoom or skype. It was very strange but we were still able to produce work together, together but separately.
Some parts of working in quarantine were fantastic. I had time to walk in the fields with my dog, we were lucky it was a beautiful spring, but it was lonely. One thing about being an artist is that sometimes you must work alone to get a deeper understanding of what you want to create.
The pandemic has nothing to do with the work, it was my own thinking before covid-19 began, it just changed the way we had to make it. Although NEBULA was not a response to the pandemic, you can look at the work and think about covid.
How do the ideas behind the work, being derived from your experiences in life and travel, transcend as jewelry and create something new within the viewer/wearer?
In 2016 I was in Japan for 3 months with my husband. We were doing an artist residency in a small beautiful japanese house sitting in the rain, it was always raining. I was bumping my head all of the time on the low beams and we would sit there making blind drawings from 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening. It goes on and on and on. It becomes erotic, it becomes strange. It's silent and what we’ve never done together is make drawings; he is an architect, he is making drawings but very different drawings. It was for me an unbelievable thing that happened, we did this for 3 weeks and then we traveled to the temple for 3 weeks. Our time in that old japanese house in the rain was crazy. Very very small, condensed, and beautiful.
Did you start thinking about fade away then or did that come later?
I was thinking about MA, “MA the space inbetween”, a japanese icon about what you can't see or hear. I wanted to create something related to this emptiness of space so I made jewelry that used mirrors to show the distance between you and me. When you look into the piece you see yourself in a deep dark pond, in the “space inbetween”.
I was very interested in reduction, the essence of life, and why I was doing things. It became more or less a meditation. I feel myself very much sometimes as a drama queen. I find that sometimes I work really in the drama queen way but the last few years it's silent, very, very, going into the essence. SUCTUS is related to life and death. The form of the baby bath and the coffin were important as they created a funnel to suck in light that made the pieces glow underneath.
NEBULA starts about 2 or 3 years after our time in Japan.
How does the work relate to the body of the wearer and how did you choose where/how it could be adorned?
First of all I am a very bad jeweler. I am not concerned when it comes to fitting the body or having it rest on a garment nicely. My work is more of an alien to the body. Not made to fit, it's like a blop it comes out of the wearer. It is about thinking and life experience and it has more to do with people who are viewing the piece than the way it fits the wearer.
NEBULA is about reflection and light. You see, then you can’t see; it is there and then it is not. When it's sitting on the table you must move the piece around to see it. When worn as a brooch and the body moves, it is there and then not there. Through the body's movement the pieces catch the light to subtly reveal what's inside.
In SUCTUS you created pieces that funneled light through stone giving the work a glowing presence. Similarly the NEBULA series uses frosted glass to diffuse light, allowing the work to capture a feeling of “elusive proximity”. Have you always considered using light as a tool of engagement or has it developed with these latest works?
In the past I was never working with light. It was the meaning, without light you don't see. Using light in my work happened by coincidence.
I was given a gift when I used amber stones in SUCTUS. The stones glowed in the light and I thought, wow this is crazy, really excellent and accidental. It happened by chance, I like that more, when things are not planned.
The use of light in NEBULA was also a coincidence. I was trying to make nothingness and something that fades away. When you see the beginning experiments, you see I made a lot of shit/mistakes; they were not good. It is very important that you can make bad things, the more bad things you make the better it is. Only from the failures can you learn.
What do the different characteristics of light mean to you?
I did not think about the characteristics of light so much. I thought about the light in SUCTUS, the sucking of light into the SUCTUS to get a certain kind of glow.
In NEBULA the light is more all around, the piece catches light and becomes a reflection.There it was glowing and now the light is condensed. Like ice it's a state of water. It looks like water or mist or fog. It's an optimistic state of light, the state of nothingness.
The installations of your work are always meticulously considered. Your work is viewed in spaces much different than, say, those of a ‘normal’ jewelry exhibition. Will the installation be minimal, in congruence with conveying a feeling of silence and nothingness, or have you planned a more elaborate display?
I am trying out in the studio to find out what that will be. I can be a drama queen and put a smoke machine in the gallery and everyone can go “cough cough”. I always want that, but it is a stupid idea.
The installation will be minimal, using materials that evoke the feeling of being in fog and surrounded by nothing. It's a fingertip of the meaning of the work. I can’t give the audience too much information. There needs to be space to feel and think about the work; otherwise, the mystery is lost.
----------------------------------------------------
Interview of Ruudt Peters by Marley White.
Marley White, I am an artist and contemporary jeweler from Richmond, VA. This May I was selected as a 2020 Windgate Fellow, this fellowship supports my internships with Ruudt Peters, Ted Noten, and Gijs Bakker in Amsterdam, NL. During the first wave of the pandemic, August 2020, I interviewed Ruudt Peters over zoom about his upcoming work, NEBULA
What sparked your making of NEBULA and why does it feel important to be making this work now?
What sparked? I was making circles, searching for the fade away. Something that is both there and not there. The most important thing in the beginning was graveyards. They’re not the same in America as they are here because America has not existed for as long. Here the stones fade away with time and you can no longer make out the image. For a moment I was creating images about fading away but then the work became not only about the graveyards but also about space and air. It went from black to white, my focus on graveyards was put on hold. Slowly, I started an investigation of light.
I go back to my childhood when I was 10 years old, I had to bike 10 KM every morning and evening through rain and sun.The most exciting moments were when I biked through the fog. It is crazy, the very strong feeling of being in nothing, alone in nothing. Everything became silent, it was really zero. This feeling came back to me when I was walking for 4 hours in the mist in Japan. I was walking in “nowhere”, trees and water basins plopped up and disappeared. I had the feeling that I was walking in a dream.
When you speak in the mist and the fog it absorbs all of your noise and sounds to completely nothing. That's what I really tried to capture and slowly something started.
Producing a new body of work amidst a global pandemic is a fantastic feat.
Were you at all influenced by the current events unfolding or were your investigations in NEBULA a separate and personal endeavor?
Three fourths of the work was already done, but covid came up and made it a strange situation. Koen, my assistant, worked in the studio for 2 days while I would be at my summer studio, when I worked in the Amsterdam studio he would not be there. We never saw each other but would communicante over zoom or skype. It was very strange but we were still able to produce work together, together but separately.
Some parts of working in quarantine were fantastic. I had time to walk in the fields with my dog, we were lucky it was a beautiful spring, but it was lonely. One thing about being an artist is that sometimes you must work alone to get a deeper understanding of what you want to create.
The pandemic has nothing to do with the work, it was my own thinking before covid-19 began, it just changed the way we had to make it. Although NEBULA was not a response to the pandemic, you can look at the work and think about covid.
How do the ideas behind the work, being derived from your experiences in life and travel, transcend as jewelry and create something new within the viewer/wearer?
In 2016 I was in Japan for 3 months with my husband. We were doing an artist residency in a small beautiful japanese house sitting in the rain, it was always raining. I was bumping my head all of the time on the low beams and we would sit there making blind drawings from 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening. It goes on and on and on. It becomes erotic, it becomes strange. It's silent and what we’ve never done together is make drawings; he is an architect, he is making drawings but very different drawings. It was for me an unbelievable thing that happened, we did this for 3 weeks and then we traveled to the temple for 3 weeks. Our time in that old japanese house in the rain was crazy. Very very small, condensed, and beautiful.
Did you start thinking about fade away then or did that come later?
I was thinking about MA, “MA the space inbetween”, a japanese icon about what you can't see or hear. I wanted to create something related to this emptiness of space so I made jewelry that used mirrors to show the distance between you and me. When you look into the piece you see yourself in a deep dark pond, in the “space inbetween”.
I was very interested in reduction, the essence of life, and why I was doing things. It became more or less a meditation. I feel myself very much sometimes as a drama queen. I find that sometimes I work really in the drama queen way but the last few years it's silent, very, very, going into the essence. SUCTUS is related to life and death. The form of the baby bath and the coffin were important as they created a funnel to suck in light that made the pieces glow underneath.
NEBULA starts about 2 or 3 years after our time in Japan.
How does the work relate to the body of the wearer and how did you choose where/how it could be adorned?
First of all I am a very bad jeweler. I am not concerned when it comes to fitting the body or having it rest on a garment nicely. My work is more of an alien to the body. Not made to fit, it's like a blop it comes out of the wearer. It is about thinking and life experience and it has more to do with people who are viewing the piece than the way it fits the wearer.
NEBULA is about reflection and light. You see, then you can’t see; it is there and then it is not. When it's sitting on the table you must move the piece around to see it. When worn as a brooch and the body moves, it is there and then not there. Through the body's movement the pieces catch the light to subtly reveal what's inside.
In SUCTUS you created pieces that funneled light through stone giving the work a glowing presence. Similarly the NEBULA series uses frosted glass to diffuse light, allowing the work to capture a feeling of “elusive proximity”. Have you always considered using light as a tool of engagement or has it developed with these latest works?
In the past I was never working with light. It was the meaning, without light you don't see. Using light in my work happened by coincidence.
I was given a gift when I used amber stones in SUCTUS. The stones glowed in the light and I thought, wow this is crazy, really excellent and accidental. It happened by chance, I like that more, when things are not planned.
The use of light in NEBULA was also a coincidence. I was trying to make nothingness and something that fades away. When you see the beginning experiments, you see I made a lot of shit/mistakes; they were not good. It is very important that you can make bad things, the more bad things you make the better it is. Only from the failures can you learn.
What do the different characteristics of light mean to you?
I did not think about the characteristics of light so much. I thought about the light in SUCTUS, the sucking of light into the SUCTUS to get a certain kind of glow.
In NEBULA the light is more all around, the piece catches light and becomes a reflection.There it was glowing and now the light is condensed. Like ice it's a state of water. It looks like water or mist or fog. It's an optimistic state of light, the state of nothingness.
The installations of your work are always meticulously considered. Your work is viewed in spaces much different than, say, those of a ‘normal’ jewelry exhibition. Will the installation be minimal, in congruence with conveying a feeling of silence and nothingness, or have you planned a more elaborate display?
I am trying out in the studio to find out what that will be. I can be a drama queen and put a smoke machine in the gallery and everyone can go “cough cough”. I always want that, but it is a stupid idea.
The installation will be minimal, using materials that evoke the feeling of being in fog and surrounded by nothing. It's a fingertip of the meaning of the work. I can’t give the audience too much information. There needs to be space to feel and think about the work; otherwise, the mystery is lost.
----------------------------------------------------
Interview of Ruudt Peters by Marley White.
Marley White, I am an artist and contemporary jeweler from Richmond, VA. This May I was selected as a 2020 Windgate Fellow, this fellowship supports my internships with Ruudt Peters, Ted Noten, and Gijs Bakker in Amsterdam, NL. During the first wave of the pandemic, August 2020, I interviewed Ruudt Peters over zoom about his upcoming work, NEBULA
a conversation with Ruudt Peters
In Conversation with Ruudt Peters....
It started as an interview and it ended up as a lovely chat between two old friends.
A 'magical' and somehow 'mystical' unique talk....
"I am what I am and my husband can never understand my jokes.
What I mostly appreciate in people, is honesty and I feel I learn more by people around me when they are sincere, I in fact love people's 'feedback'.
As a child, I recall to be a 'daydreamer' and also how much I learned from my father who was a very good carpenter. I started with wood and I then discovered metal. He told me, what you can make in wood you can make it in metal.
Usually, the back side of my pieces is even better than the front side, maybe because I started with carving wood at first....because my Dad told me, that on the back side there are also living people.
To me all the details are important in an object and 'all has to come together' in a work of art and it has to 'make sense'.
I consider myself 'a maker' and all my work has different 'layers' to it. The multi layers in an object, hide the mystery of life and death, which is 'unpredictable' .
In my life I always have to 'investigate' things, I like to 'learn' and 'understand'.
I am a' jeweller' and all the rest that sorrounds me, is really secondary to me. I do learn who I am through the practice of jewellery and I love to educate students into one single practice, not into multidisciplinary jewellery. A jewel is a small item that gives you the chance to better understand the world around you and who you are.
The best experiment of my life was a spiritual trip to France back in 2012, where I did meditation with a group of friends, a group of captains of industry and my spiritual coach......I have to say 'I was in heaven'.
It was a very private experience which somehow changed my life.
Now with Covid I am also experiencing silence and solitude...long walks with my dog, listening to the outdoors and working in my studio. 'Slowing down' gave me a new power and energy. I hope we will cherish and remember this in the future.
Colours are a trigger to me, for example I do hate red, it is too aggressive, but at the same time I like to investigate this colour, it has the power of 'love'.
Then when it comes to my jewelry, I prefer using black. This colour, black, sums in it all the other colours. Black is 'silence' to me. Black just 'fascinates' me.
In my life my Mom was also very important. My Mom was not always very nice to me, but I do recall one time when, at the age of 8, she gave me to wear at school with my friends...a 'pied de poule' pair of bagged trousers. I truly loved the design, but I hated the impact it had on my friends at school.
That day, my Mom taught me a great lesson in life, which I still cherish today ...'the seed' of not being afraid ever in life, to be' extreme' in what I do.
As far as glasses are concerned, I buy a pair every two years from a very good belgian designer. Now black glasses are an expression of who I am ...my 'brand' in a way.
Laura, I believe in life in 'repetition' and also in 'failures'.
We should all learn from failures and 'try again' and 'never stop' in life, since the only limit human beings have to me....... is 'the sky' !" Ruudt Peters
Artist Ruudt Peters MASK photo: Adam Popo
