Project Land Jewelry
LandJewelry is a project that took place by the shore of Öland, Sweden during the last days of August 2021. Eight artists with a background in jewelry, coming from four different countries of the Baltic region, met on the island to create land art – or, as we call it: Land Jewelry.
We worked with what was at hand in the landscape around us to make temporary pieces of art with the thematic background of the Baltic Sea and the environmental threats it faces.
During five working days, we created almost 30 pieces of ‘land jewels’ by the shore of Segerstad on southeast Öland, most of them sculptural installations. All pieces have been left where they were created, with the exception of some non-degradable material we removed. Sooner or later our land jewelry will degrade and the material it was made of will become part of the surrounding nature again. The traces of our intervention will fade.
We exhibited the result of our work on the island first in September ’21 in Öland’s museum in Himmelsberga, Sweden, then in the Maritime Centre Vellamo in Kotka, Finland in November. In February ’22 you could see the project in Helsinki at Paja and in May in the Gallery of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association in Klaipeda, Lithuania. In the exhibitions we showed photos and a map of the Land Jewels, as well as some previous jewelry work from all participants and, where possible, the above video showing the land art pieces in situ on Öland.
All of us are inspired and enamored with nature and the landscapes around us and we are concerned by the threats many ecosystems face because of climate change and other human intervention. We want to show and share this concern and raise the public’s awareness of environmental issues that ultimately concern all of us living by the Baltic Sea, or really anywhere on this planet.
Last but not least these pieces are also simply an homage to this – our – beautiful Baltic Sea.
The project was created and organized by Maja Breife(SE) and Wiebke Pandikow (FI) and the artists who joined us on the island are: Ingrid Berg (SE), Aino-Astrid Gaedtke (DE), Elli Hukka (FI), Karina Kazlauskaite (LT), Lauryna Kiškytė (LT) and Kajsa Wikström (SE).
Feel free to further explore the projects and see all the artworks on Facebook (Project Land Jewelry) and Instagram @projectlandjewelry
All participants stayed at Segerstad’s lighthouse on the South-East coat of Öland and we also created our land jewelry in that area.
Project Land Jewelry is a private initiative by jewelry artists Maja Breife from Sweden and Wiebke Pandikow from Finland. We work with contemporary jewelry ourselves but are also very interested in the natural world and concerned about environmental issues. We want to show and share this concern and raise awareness, while also broadening our own practice. We invited other jewelry artists to participate in this project because having more participants means more dialogue, an exchange of skills and in the end a wider array of different and interesting land art pieces.