The Heritage : A personal study of the brooch as a signal surface

Sammanfattning: This paper looks at how I as a jeweller can use my craft knowledge to raise awareness of environmental issues. In our society we are informed on a daily basis how elevated average temperatures, melting glaciers and forest fires affect and will affect our future, but also future generations’ living conditions on earth. Despite this, most of us just try to live our lives as usual. But all this information worries me, mostly for the future of my children, and I don’t know how to relate to it. I think about what inheritance I will leave behind. In this paper, I explore how I, in my role as a jewellry artist, can contribute to the discussion about the climate. To investigate this, I use theories of semiotics and visual communication as a frame for my work and I have chosen to dig where I stand and use work methods that I can find at home, but which I can also link to my profession as a jeweller. I have collected plastic  packaging that is the result of my family’s consumption. With this as a starting point, I have created plastic stones that leads my thoughts to future fossils and the Anthropocene era. My main tool has been the iron, with which I have achieved heat and a certain pressure to mimic the conditions under which minerals in nature are created. The plastic stones were made into brooches and the work has finally resulted in pictures where my children wear the brooches I have made of our common waste. Both the brooches and the images are linked to the theoretical framework of the paper.