Graduated from Birmingham Institute of Art & Design
Selected by Ruth Claxton
Demons of Age, 2007
Artist statement
The world around us changes, mixes, grows, becomes a melting pot of different people and cultures. This development offers a lot of advantages in terms of communication and exchange. Globalisation helps us to unite the world, but also threatens to homogenise difference and individuality.
'Higher, faster, better' seems to be the idea that is settled in the human mind, being influenced by advertisement and stimulus satiation. The outside world becomes more and more important and in turn the internal world, developing one's own uninfluenced ideas, seems to loose its value. For the individual to find a way to break out of that dynamic becomes more and more difficult. In a time of satellite systems, mobile phones, identity cards and CCTV surveillance, a physical escape is doomed to remain a dream. While the adventurers of ancient times could look at the horizon and imagine, dreaming today is interfered with skyscrapers and television broadcasts.
One way of escape I think, can be found in a self-created realm of fantasy; there one might find a way of feel free, can indulge one's needs and desires.
My work is concerned with the idea of finding access to the world of dreams, desires and wishes. I view my pieces as witnesses of experiences made in reality, but being transferred to a place of fantasy. The pieces are meant to offer the viewer access points, pathways and doors to the world of dreaming and the inner self.
There we find the resources and strength needed to carry on living in reality. Without dreams, one becomes a robot.
Selector text
Lisa Juen's work manifested itself for this show as a small sculptural installation, a series of pieces suspended in space above a large, low, yellow plinth. The hanging objects appeared to be the product of daydreams; doodled, simple shapes cut from single sheets of material and then folded or extruded outwards in order to create more complex forms. Lengths of silk thread wove absentmindedly across holes or through voids and tangled around large, glamorously cut jewels.
A number of the pieces appeared to be in suspended animation, in the process of exploding, unravelling or mutating; compact, intricate sculpture-jewellery hybrids which simultaneously referenced lo-tech sci-fi, cartoons, Lucienne Gray textile designs, Utopian architecture and Gabo and homespun craft. As one walked around the pieces they unfolded, revealing complex interfaces between differing textures on opposing surfaces, subtle juxtapositions of colour and a well judged interplay between the subtly coloured enamel and the pure decorative chutzpah of the huge stones which were frequently fabulously out of proportion to the rest of the object. This all combined to make them immensely tactile, seductive, if not easily worn, objects which successfully fulfil Juen's aim of offering us a small opportunity for escape and fantasy.
(Ruth Claxton, 2007)
Qualifications and training
- 2007 MA Jewellery Silversmithing and Related Products, Distinction, UCE, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, Birmingham
- 2006 Goldsmith Apprenticeship Exam in Idar-Oberstein, Germany
- 2006 BA (Hons), Jewellery and Silversmithing, UCE, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, Birmingham
- 2005 Prediploma, University of Applied Gemstone and Jewellery Design, Idar-Oberstein, Germany
