Meta Joanknecht - Precious Collective
Meta Joanknecht
Designer biography:
Meta Joanknecht works with waste, discarded, found and recycled materials. These materials have been weathered and deformed, they have gained their appearance from life’s cycles. Joanknecht is mesmerised by the stories they tell. ‘My materials are like letters fallen from words, dropped out of speech. I give them a new voice’. They are the palette from which she creates new narratives. They become jewellery; necklaces, brooches, objects to adorn. The long tradition of making jewellery is framed in a modern age gatherers ‘use-what-you-find’ mode.
Collection concept:
'Drifters', beached stories from the South China Sea.
Washed up on the beach they lay, these fishing net floats.
Remnants of lives and livelihoods of Vietnamese fishermen.
Every day many small boats sail out to sea to provide for small communities. But the sea has its own logic, storm and current took its toll, they came unstuck from the nets. Adrift without a goal but as reminders of fishing tales, currents and winds drove them back to land.
Now, they rest in my hands. Each piece reclaimed through the language of jewellery.
Gathered not as waste, but as narrative artefacts.
They return not to sea, but to adorn, a second voyage, a new intention.
