Voices of Materials: Probing the Cultural Ecology of Material Finitude

How can jewellery act as a performative medium that tells stories about material finitude on a planetary and local scale? This question came forth from my design practice, which concerns with the sourcing and valuing of materials, and my role as a jeweller within contemporary environmental discourses.
Just as the ‘Blue Marble’ image shed new view on Earth, can jewellery, with its small scale in this world, be able to create new, caring ways of relating to planetary processes or hyperobjects we are part of, yet which remain, in their complexity, hard to grasp.
The subject of this research is material finitude, the planetary limitation of materials. From an eco-critical approach, I propose an inquiry that goes beyond the human time scale to materiality.
With the methodology of probing I aim to learn what materials have witnessed and how they have transformed within their economic and environmental- cultural contexts. The voices that emerge are brought to public conversation in the tactile and visual language of jewellery.
Actively listening to three materials – sand, coal and water – forms the basis for three case studies, and a range of outcomes that contributes to wider discourse on the entanglement of humans, materials and ecosystems.