Hearing Aid Jewellery
Colette Hazelwood with Mickey Fellows and Ali Briggs
"Colettes
wonderful and exuberant pieces aren’t for the faint hearted. Her exciting
mix of both precious and non-precious materials are a perfect compliment to
the body to which they adorn. Nylon plastic, steel and aluminium are combined
with silver and gold to create Colette's unique style that is 'contemporary
jewellery'. She suggests you throw away your diamond ring and join her outside
of the jewellery closet."
Collette writes: The hearing aid in the past has been well known for being bland and 'skin coloured', (if your skin is 'beige' or 'brown') and in my opinion completely impersonal. With a client in mind, I set out to create an ear/ head piece for Ali that would not disguise the fact that she was deaf but to instead celebrate the hearing aid and decorate the head.
The hearing aid jewellery is an accumulation of negotiations between myself and Ali, I took into account her personality, hair and eye colour as well as her own way of expressing herself.
The end result was this sophisticated and extravagant silver and nylon ear piece.
After meeting my second client, I quickly realised that I had a very different task ahead of me. Mickey wears a cochlear implant and had very definite ideas of his requirements. By his own admission he is not a big 'jewellery' wearer and he didn’t want anything like Ali’s ear piece. We discussed at length the politics behind wearing a coclear implant and peoples' perceptions of what they think is jacked into his head. I was drawn to the fact that people think he’s 'half man, half machine', a cyborg if you like.
We decided on an arm piece to represent the machine age we live in, an object that would confirm viewers perceptions of him as a robot.
Ali wearing her 'Hearing Aid Jewellery"
Photography courtesy of the artist
© The City Gallery, Leicester and the artists: 2001
This site was built by Ju Gosling aka ju90 during an artist's residency at Oriel 31 in November 2001