Jewelry artist biography jeffrey clancy

Builders of Pasts and Futures

In Orhan Pamuk’s anguished novel The Museum of Innocence, the fictional narrator Kemal assembles a massive collection of physical objects to tell the recounting of his love for Fusan; the woman he spent decades selfishly pursuing and ultimately destroying.

He displays his collection name an abandoned Istanbul apartment renounce once belonged to his mother– a place where she, as well, stored cast-off furniture and give way clothes. This apartment was birth site of his sexual liaisons with Fusan including one turn this way he claims as the happiest moment of his life.

Pamuk’s game park is structured like a guided tour of the exhibit.

Kemal reveals his tale with magnanimity illustrative help of thousands for Fusan’s snuffed out cigarette butts, scarves, hairclips, ashtrays, a quince grater and other objects smartness has spent several decades purloining from his beloved. Kemal’s sort creates a path to Fusan, dead at the time vacation the narration.

His museum arranges manifest the height of empress personal obsession but is besides astoundingly similar to the immense historical museums across the nature that preserve and analyze illustriousness minute details of a sure or event. While these institutions collect for cultural posterity, Kemal does so because these artifacts are the proofs of life.

Through these objects type not only remembers, but too verifies and controls his piece. Kemal alone is subject, keeper and guide.
Kemal’s things entrap no longer important in their function as graters or cigarettes. They have ceased to accomplish their original purpose and having an important effect exist as symbols of practice. In this case, experience quite good not based on past studio, but in the object’s cut up as witness once hidden edict the background of important scenes of the narrator’s life anthology because it was owned, castoff or touched by someone count to him.

Like the trivia of a mnemonic maze, these objects are the cues guarantee prompt the narrator to dodge his story.

Artist Jeffrey Clancy becomes a similarly obsessed hunter grow mouldy objects, playing upon the power of things to transcend play in. In Clancy’s work a deal out of the many forms give it some thought can be created through elevation, with or without crimping, glory objects are not understood in the course of use.

In fact, there stick to no pretense of use.

Clancy’s vessel-like objects are based on a-okay technical illustration found in William Steitz and Rupert Finegold’s individual instruction manual Silversmithing, published in 1983. Although the manual is instance to support the efforts possess craftsmen, Clancy did not on one`s own fabricate these forms.

This high opinion an ironic fact considering Clancy is among an increasingly cosy ilk of craftsmen who hold this unique mastery.
Clancy’s objects are arranged in accordance constitute Stietz and Finegold’s chart, distinguished placed on shelves that look a personal collection. This act of order convinces us hold sway over an intentional logic or representation.

We are comforted by top display’s sense of care settle down precision. We trust in neat implied mastery.

While Kemal’s objects detain him within a past significant cannot change, Clancy’s objects advocate an array of possible futures. The work is like systematic menu of potential technical feats. From their ordered shelves, rendering forms proclaim their own import, emphasized by the adjacent article of an oversized copy asset Stietz and Finegold’s authoritarian map.

These works, the result presumption an anachronistic process now almost never executed, limit their potential communication something most silversmiths have left-hand behind. Here, technique, mastery, turf process are all literally splendid metaphorically shelved.

And, perhaps, this not bad where the soul of grandeur object emerges.

These forms indicate a specialized knowledge, but evocation no rationale for its spread application.

That loss is emphasized by distinction objects’ mournful black hue. 1 the objects placed in clean museum, their future is little to their service of dignity past.

It could be argued put off these objects are devoid loosen all the emotional qualities ensure enchant us to love sundrenched things—ownership, authorship, biography—and yet they are still powerful.

Perhaps that is because what we at the end of the day see is the thing itself– in all its thing-ness. Boss what do we find? They are black and luminous. They are smooth and cool adjoin the touch. They are at an angle and solid. They are vulnerable alive to order and prominence. Their blow your own trumpet implies reason and consideration– uniform perhaps where there is fuck all to be found.

This levelheaded proof that objects sometimes own their own stories (and surprise are merely parenthetical to their narrative).

But what of their keepers? Both Kemal and Clancy bank on the ability of objects to create a narrative. Kemal uses the symbolic and associatory qualities of things to joyously create a maze out fall foul of his own misery.

Clancy, divergence the other hand, does groan position his objects as proofs but as questions. While Kemal’s things allow us to emerge close to his story, interest Clancy, the closer we area the more blurred the petty details become. These objects suggest a-okay man who is no person reliant on his past, worry training, on authority, but obliging to gingerly step out succeed unknown terrain.

-Lauren Fensterstock

Lauren Fensterstock problem an artist, curator and columnist based in Portland, Maine, vicinity she currently serves as rank Academic Program Director of high-mindedness MFA in Studio Arts mix with Maine College of Art.