Eden Lennox - Party Animals

An exhibition of contemporary jewellery combining precious metals and post-consumables; parts of vintage dolls, toys and found objects; a body of work that takes as its starting points the reuse and "upcycling" ethos of arte povera and the do-it-yourself aesthetic of post-punk.

A circuit "“ whether it is a season of parties, a lap around a park, or a motherboard "“ is something that we create, from the material word around us. And even the most private circuits, what we might call "local loops", will still, nevertheless have points of contact with much broader networks. In particular, art constitutes what some scholars call 'circuits of value', because of the agency that we, individually or socially, assign to particular works. This preciousness, whether it is personal or universal, follows because it embodies market value, utility, or an emotive power.

Eden Lennox's latest series, 'Party Animals', is an assembly of art objects that she has created from intricately reworked and recontextualised materials: from gold leaf and sterling silver to vinyl records, bottle caps, dolls and miniatures. These party animals are "“ much like the Day of the Dead, currently getting underway in Mexico "“ rare and inherently paradoxical: they might allude simultaneously, for instance, to the idyll of a teddy-bears picnic, or the ferocity of a "political animal".

Artist Statement

The notion of preciousness is the key consideration of my practice; I examine it in terms of how preciousness is shaped by an individual's cultural and territorial identity, and how an individual's relationship to a culture and space is expressed within the realm of objects and the contemporary consumer marketplace. My practice is reflective and informed by a consideration of the indexing of social space and the concomitant interrelationships of objects within society.

The observations that inform my practice are therefore filtered through the world of contemporary art and culture. I am concerned with materiality and the crossing-over, relocating and recontextualising of precious objects. This plays out in my practice by the embedding of social indices within the objects I design and fabricate. I use a combination of precious metals and post-consumables. I consider reuse, the up-cycling ethos of arte povera and the DIY aesthetic of post-punk. I use, for example, parts of vintage dolls, toys, found objects and post-consumables.

These kinds of materials are used for their indexicality "“ to trigger and build visual tension and narratives, using the mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor.