We are very happy and honoured with Clem Edwards as our new Department Head of Jewellery - Linking Bodies. They have taken up their new role at the start of the new academic year.
Clem Edwards is a Rotterdam-based artist from Naarm, Melbourne (Australia) working between language and sculpture. Their practice enacts material, experiential and affective residues of daily life. Busy with enchantment and its implications, their work brings into conversation the possibility of the glittering dream castle and the deep knowing that the Disney story cannot exist without the labour, gender and land conditions that produced it.
Clem has a background in book publishing and metalwork. They first fell for the Jewellery–Linking Bodies department in 2022, when they were a Gerrit Rietveld Academie fellow, and are currently (hand)making brass and bronze hinges with memes on them. As Clem describes: 'I’m thinking about thresholds, and ways in which we pass through the world – architecturally, politically, gender-wise, etc.'.
Questions they will bring to the department are: 'How do we engage with a work? How we are invited (or not invited) to lean in closer to a thing –literally or figuratively?'