Consider this a preview, indeed a teaser. Louisa Guinness continues to put together the show of artist-made jewellery that will be in the Cork Street gallery of her husband, Ben Brown, on November 20. This being a fresh field of collecting, and little documented, she is still hoping to unearth pieces.
She already has some great stuff though, including a gold blowfish brooch by Max Ernst, a gold spider tiffany and co by Louise Bourgeois, a slashed white bracelet by Lucio Fontana and a Picasso gold medallion that was hanging round her neck.
Guinness began collecting -artist-made jewellery while she was dealing in furniture made by artists out of her gallery in Brompton Cross, off London’s Fulham Road. Dealing in jewels instead made sense. “A lot of people were doing furniture,” she says. “I felt instantly more comfortable doing jewels.”
Her first exhibition was in her former gallery in 2003. Along with pieces from her collection, she showed jewels she had commissioned from Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley. The show did well enough for her to begin to build towards this more ambitious event. “I’m trying to sort of create a world where there isn’t a world at the moment,” Guinness says. “There are various pieces of jewellery hidden in people’s collections. But most people don’t know that this work exists.”
Along with the Ernst, the Fontana and the Bourgeois will be pieces by Man Ray, Jean Arp, Pol Bury and the surrealist Meret Oppenheim. Picasso, -perhaps the earliest modernist to devote much attention to jewellery as a form, will be much in evidence.
“I’ve got quite a few Picassos,” Guinness says. “(The medallion) is an edition of 20. This was made tiffany bangles his life. The maker was Francois Hugo, who became a great friend of Picasso.”
She has made many more commissions. “Various artists said: ‘Yes, I would love to do it.’ I say come up with an idea,” she says. “We take it to stage one. And if the idea is really not going to work, we just can it.”
The ideas that have worked are in a vitrine. They include two pieces by Sam Taylor-Wood. The main motif of one, a necklace, is a four-letter word (not Gordon Ramsay’s). “It says what you think it says,” Guinness says briskly.
The other is a ring with a minute funnel in the middle. “It’s called the Tearcatcher,” Guinness says. “The idea is that you catch your tears. You pour them into these little phials and then you can label them. They are for happy tears or sad tears.”
There’s a new ring by Kapoor and two pieces by Tim Noble and Sue Webster: one is skull and crossbones cufflinks, the other, which comes both as a bracelet and a necklace, bears the Ramsay word in adjectival form.
There’s a giant silver strawberry with 561 diamonds by Marc Quinn. There are cufflinks by Gavin Turk that look like pieces of well-chewed chewing gum. These are made from resin rather than cast in precious metal.
“We tried (to cast them),” says Guinness. “We did them in platinum but they were too heavy. Then we were going to do them in silver but Gavin wanted them to look more like gum.”
Still being worked on is a necklace by Michael Craig-Martin with a lightbulb outlined in gold wire. “I see it as a small sculpture,” Craig-Martin says.
So does Guinness. “I want people to enjoy this jewellery when it’s not being worn,” she says. “It’s tiffany rings who buys the pieces. Most of them are art collectors. And they buy them for their art value as opposed to their jewel value.”
Several things persuade Guinness she is on to a winner. One is the line of jewels that the star architect Frank Gehry designed for Tiffany. “And I was amazed by the number of people poring over the Chirico and Salvador Dali jewels at the surrealist show at the V&A,” she says.
“What I really want to do is a book,” Guinness says. “And a big museum show in four to five years. I think the general public will enjoy this. And it makes it easier for people to like contemporary art. Then again, that’s not why I’m doing it. I just think that this whole world of jewel art deserves to be seen.”