Melissa Cameron Jewellery Exhibition

Melissa Cameron Jewellery Exhibition

Award winning Australian jewellery artist, Melissa Cameron, presents new work for her solo show, inspired by geometry, from the regular rhythmic patterns of architecture to the seemingly random fractals of nature.

Melissa works to draw people toward, and then into, her works of jewellery. As in built space, she has found that the ordering of the layers, as well as the patterns themselves, lead the eye on a journey through the jewellery piece. The complexity of the work aims to engage the viewer by making patterns that are hard to apprehend in a single glance. Prolonged attention is rewarded via the tension at play in the piece, a literal tension that comes from the way the pieces are strung together. When deliberately slackened the steel cable can allow layers of the pattern to move, making it seem as if the jewel has come alive.

Using CAD programs, Melissa conceives patterns using the tools of Euclidean geometry, these being translation, rotation and reflection, with which she also incorporates the function of scaling - self-similarity at shifted scales - the fractal influence. She then produces these drawings onto various metals, often steel, which she sandblasts and blackens, and releases them into the three dimensional form through sawing and threading steel cable through the layers creating a tension and delicacy to the piece.

In this exhibition, an intricate pattern is created, and then broken up, with elements forming earrings, pendants, neckpieces and brooches. Colour is brought into the pieces through the application of enamel.

Since completing her Master of Fine Arts at Monash University in 2009, Melissa Cameron has gone from strength to strength having exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas, winning numerous awards. Most recently, the Gold Prize at the Cheonju International Craft Competition 2011 in Cheongju, Korea and the highly esteemed Melbourne Arts Centre Prize, Buda Contemporary Australian Silver Exhibition, Castlemaine, 2011. In 2011 her work was also selected for the 'Love Lace' exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum and most recently Melissa was announced as one of the finalists in the 2011 Woollahra Small Sculpture prize.

A solo exhibition by Australian jewellery artist Melissa Cameron
26th February - 17th March 2012 (Tuesday to Saturday 11am-6pm)
Studio 20/17: Unit 6b 2 Danks St Waterloo Ph: (02) 9698 7999