A tribute to my time mentored by Berlin based artist Gabi Schillig, Berlin Imagined reflects upon our many online conversations between early 2020 and mid 2022. Conversations framed by the borders around our screens, our cameras offered  glimpses into each other's worlds, lives and spaces. Divided by distance, and yet to meet ‘irl’ each of us is yet to set foot in the other’s city.

The works in this series continue my explorations for how we understand urban space. Zoom links meld time and space, virtual portals into faraway places the imagination attempts to visualise. Berlin, the city, becomes like one of those described in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities- a myth, a dream, a fable.

I borrow from vintage Berlin maps, colour coded neighbourhoods informing the size and shape of aluminium brooches, as well as their palette. Cutouts reference parks and public spaces, (and the cut map works of Sol LeWitt)- some real, some imagined, but all spaces displaced and reconfigured. Upon these shapes the features of the Berlin maps are recreated, yet again, local residents may be unnerved- the topology of the shapes at odds with the layout of the streets that overlay them. In some instances streets are simply skewed, rotated off their ‘physical’ moorings. In others neighbourhoods and their forms are at complete odds

These works return to previously considerations of maps as deficient representations of physical space, here transformed into objects that conform with the notion of space (and place) as essentially unknowable beyond embodied experience. Yet additionally, these pieces also stand for the fictions of my imagination, a city of immense history- a history known, misknown, unknown.... A city often imagined, but yet to be visited.

BERLIN IMAGINED

3 Brooches, Various sizes, Laser etched anodized aluminium, silver, steel.

This series of work was first presented in the show ‘Handshake7: 12 New Zealand Jewellers’ at Galerie Marzee, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 4 December 2022 - 12 February 2023.