Invitation to the photo session: Museum of Natural History receives precious jewellery made of petrified wood
On Wednesday, 2 September 2015, 1 p.m., jewellery designer Beate Eismann, Halle/Saale, will hand over two valuable brooches as a donation in kind to the Natural History Museum in Tietz.
The shape, material and title of the two brooches refer to "lithotheques". Such archives, created for comparative purposes, have been of unbroken importance as a scientific instrument in mineralogy, geology and palaeontology for centuries.
Beate Eismann is one of eleven international jewellery designers invited by curator Prof. Ines Bruhn to take part in the exhibition "News from the Permian - International Contemporary Jewellery Art and the Chemnitz Petrified Forest". The dialogue between natural history and contemporary jewellery art was the focus of this joint project by the Museum für Naturkunde Chemnitz and Chemnitzer Künstlerbund e.V.
The works created by Beate Eismann reveal two approaches to the theme. One group of jewellery pieces relies entirely on the physical effect of the material provided by the Petrified Forest - be it in the form of raw, unprocessed slices, polished segments or wafer-thin geological thin sections. In other works, the fossils have not been used at all or only in small doses.
They draw their references from the museum context of the Museum für Naturkunde Chemnitz, which the artists were introduced to during a two-day workshop in January 2013. These works reflect aspects of geological and natural history collection activities and scientific research methods. However, personal memories from the artist's visits to Chemnitz also influenced the process of creating the group of works.
From the special exhibition "News from the Permian - International Contemporary Jewellery Art and the Chemnitz Petrified Forest", which has been shown in the twin cities of Łodz and Ljubljana as well as in the German Goldsmiths' House in Hanau, among others, a total of nine objects by the artists Prof. Georg Dobler, Margit Jäschke, Birgit Laken, Märta Mattsson, Martin Papcun and Prof. Deganit Stern-Schocken with a total value of approx. 14,000 euros were handed over to the museum. The objects will be given a special place in the Historical Cabinet.
Representatives of the press are cordially invited to the handover of the jewellery.
Interviews with the artist and the curator of the exhibition are possible on site. (Registration under 0371 4884551)