This window installation embodies a form of duality, in both a literal and a critical sense. Kate Barton studied first as a contemporary jeweller before following this up shortly after with studies in animation. Barton manages to extrapolate one into the other, despite the sometimes restrictive specificity and material concerns of these different practices.

Comprising modular, often rectilinear forms, there is an unexpected softness in the way Barton's jewellery bends and adapts to the wearer's body. The artist notes that these works "resemble both the aesthetic of half finished buildings, steel skeletons exposed, and fragile spider webs with multifaceted, slightly different angles glinting."

An effigy of her jewellery objects, Barton's animations (also featured in this installation) describe, in a very analog manner, how she thinks about and visualizes object making. The animations illustrate how her jewellery objects are designed to move and encapsulate space. In effect this is privileging the viewer to the "3D object caught in the 2D plane of paper and ink", statically jumping and moving: embodying the potential that only the jewellery wearer can unlock.

--

Kate Barton is an Auckland based artist.