Sydney designer and jeweller Bic Teieu explores concepts of cultural hybridity and the home by exploding and rearranging floral motifs in a series of metal objects made from sterling silver and precious sheet metal alloys, which was recently exhibited at UNSW Galleries.
Created as part of Tieu’s PhD, this body of work has a strong conceptual and theoretical basis, exploring the designer’s own identity as a Southeast Asian Australian woman living between cultures.
Specifically, it explores the idea of a ‘third space’, a term coined by post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha. Tieu writes in her PhD: “It is a term to describe the state and effect of hybridity in which the overlapping of two or more cultural spaces disrupt the identification of a person through political, social and cultural negotiations forming new positions.”
The metal objects that Tieu has created have been formed by patterns inspired by tea leaves, peony and magnolia plant and flowers – all of which have a strong connection to China and South and East Asian culture. The tea leaves also refer to trade, exchange and migration.
“I started with drawing of plants and flowers and this formed part of the visual inquiry process, then I had these graphics laser cut in box board maquettes,” she explains. “The flexibility to arrange both the graphics and maquettes presented numerous layouts and a seamless translation to merge the stills into moving images. Experimenting with floral forms as moving graphics echoed ideas around themes of identity and migration.”
Tieu then used a lost wax casting for metal alloys of silver, gold and copper. These cast components were then cut and soldered to form the final sheet pattern. “Three types of alloys were worked into the five objects. Sterling silver, shakudō and shibuibui. Essentially made up of copper, gold and silver. Shakudō and Shibuibi are Japanese alloys used for producing colours ranging from hues of grey, indigo and black.”
The final forms were inspired by conceptions of the home. “I moved from jewellery to objects because of the themes I was exploring. Cultural hybridity, living in-betweenness, Asian-Australian, migration and the home are big concepts and I felt I could not address this with a wearable work,” she explains. “The geometry references my home, the home I grew up in, in south-western Sydney suburbia – red bricks, box homes and square yard.”
These pieces represent the culmination of an extensive research project whose rigour lends a depth to the final works, in addition to their detailed beauty, skilled construction and original form.
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