The video LA NOTTE / THE NIGHT; Love, Loss and Loneliness in the Age of Isolation, was first shown at Galerie Weltraum and Bayerischer Kunstgewerbeverein, Munich, as part of Schmuck Jewelery Week 2022, in the exhibition jewellery , the world’s first video festival dedicated to jewellery. Since then SMCK ON REEL has toured across Europe, showing at the Grassi Museum, Leipzig; the Romanian National Library, Bucharest, (as part of Romanian Jewelry Week); the Museum of Applied Arts & Design, Vilinus; and the National Museum of History of Ukraine, Kyiv.

the jewllery objects that feature in the video work were first exhibited in the exhibition Whānui, at The National in Ōtautahi Christchurch in October 2022, alongside the video and an artists book. text from the artists book is included below-

The trauma and the grief wrought, the deaths brought, seemed largely inconceivable in those closing months of 2019, as Covid 19 first began its insidious spread across the globe. Whatever one's views on vaccinations, mandates, the efficacy of mask wearing, whatever one's opinions on the source and origin of this virus, we must not lose sight of its true human cost upon families and communities worldwide.

Millions have died. Countless others are thankful to have endured and survived. Yet even those having escaped illness may nonetheless have been deeply affected. Job losses, job burnout, educational disappointments; the effect of lockdowns, and isolations takes their own toll. Often the personal costs remain hidden, situations occurring behind closed doors. The effects of Covid extend deep into the lives of individuals and communities alike.

Some of us have escaped these devastating consequences; safe and with families safe, for which we must be thankful. For those of us so lucky, the experience has however, not been without its challenges. The experience of living in the time of a global pandemic has disrupted perhaps, not just our lives, but our very sense of a life. Like some contemporary Divine Comedy, we all exist, waiting, in some form of purgatory for this nightmare to end.

Time itself seems somehow altered. In lockdown, time passes achingly, insufferably, as days drift and blur, fade and merge, into one another. Time, time, interminable time… ‘Covid time’ seems to exist as a kind of suspended time beyond our usual experience. 

Henri Bergson would define such as durée, that experience of subjective lived time distinct from the objective time of watches, clocks and calendars. Bergson recognised time as lived, felt and acted, not simply quantified by science. Time is not always experienced as ordered, sequential, predictable. Covid has presented us with an uncertain time, an uncertain future, and our “waiting is not to be passed through.” Covid time is a time passed slowly…

Lockdowns situate us in a perpetual present, waiting and hoping. We live this experience collectively, yet so often in isolation from each other. We seem suck in what Maurice Blanchot calls an ‘unbearable present’; “a present without end and yet impossible as a present.” An experience seemingly without end, hope fades, and waiting transforms into suffering. 

These experiences are real and true. They are the symptoms of extraordinary events, the likes most of us have never previously experienced.

This work attempts to capture something of this historical moment, and to capture it in the moment it exists. It is a memoriam to those who have passed and those who have survived. But also it is a memento to all who have endured and for what we have endured. It has been created out of the boredom, frustration, and anxiety this Covid situation has produced, but was made nonetheless in the belief that after this dark night will come a bright dawn that we can hope is near upon us. 

So let us stay strong and be kind.  Here exist 12 charms to galvanise the spirits as we endure this time of LOVE, LOSS AND LONELINESS IN THE AGE OF ISOLATION.