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“Film Noire Collection“
Jewellery is known to be the ornament of human body, an addition to the natural beauty and outfit. It is most commonly related to women and their craving for precious materials – gold and silver, as well as semi-precious stones, in order to enhance their beauty, hairdo and clothes selection.
Regarding the style, jewellery has stood alongside the fluctuations in the history of art and enriched national costumes. It has been treasured and kept as a dear memory, but also as an item of material or artistic value.
Nowadays, goldsmiths turn back to the old ways and techniques of jewellery design. In order not to forget notable parts of cultural heritage like old handicraft, historical and ethnographic pieces of jewellery have been replicated.
All this leads to the fact that, all of a sudden, before our very eyes emerges the “Film Noire Collection” in which the artist, Vanja Mijač, introduced jewellery not only as mere ornament, but also as the area of exploration and the mode of creative expression.
Obtaining a title of Art-Academy Graduate Sculptor and the Teacher of Art, and continuing a family tradition of artistic jewellery manufacture, Vanja used her artistic curiosity and skills to form each piece as a miniature sculpture. During the process of research, Vanja does not use antique jewellery as a template for replicating, but as items for redesigning. In this way an old brooch or an already damaged piece becomes a part of a composition involving silver thread, various metals, laces, ribbons and various semi-precious stones, even small parts of computer hardware. Vanja does not insist on precious materials. She enhances the value of the jewellery with a mere illuminative idea and various shapes. She combines and recycles most frequently discarded materials, making them into absolutely unexpected forms of necklaces, bracelets, rings and brooches. In this way, she provides these materials with a “second chance”. These newly-formed shapes may serve their purposes either as an ornament on one’s neck, or as a miniature sculpture. Pearls, ruby or sapphire find themselves captivated between the silver threads of hand-made net, placed on a piece of metal, leather or lace in quite unusual shapes and sizes. In this way, a brooch can easily be turned into a necklace pendant or a ring, but it can simply serve as an adornment on our cupboard shelf. Redesign of pre-made shapes becomes the redesign of style as well. The possibility to become multipurpose, alongside shapes and sizes, makes these pieces of jewellery miniature sculptures, in a way even releasing them from the denomination “jewellery”.
With “Film Noire Collection” Vanja Mijač escapes her polychromatic phase, in which the shapes of necklaces and big, multipurpose clips exist in the abundance of materials’ multicolouredness. In her new collection, the approach to materials’ selection and the way of binding them together remains the same. However, another dimension is added to the game of creating a piece of jewellery: light. Black laces and ribbons, shiny metal, pearls and filigreed jewellery, mostly containing black semi-precious stones, open a dimension of the light and shadow game, creating new dynamics inside the item itself, as well as in the surrounding environment. The association with the black-and-white reality of old films is, in fact, sculptor’s lyrical contribution to this collection, supplementing the idea of utterly different pieces of jewellery. In concordance with the chosen name of the collection, and regarding the essential difficulty of achieving perfection in artefacts’ exhibition, the layout of this exhibition and materials used to bring it to life optimally utilise the space and the game of light and shadow, in order to create an effect of “happening” per se.
Mirjana Kolumbić, prof.,
Senior Custodian
Hvar Heritage Museum
