This talk was presented at the launch of Alan Preston: Between Tides, held at Auckland Museum in March 2009
It is a pleasure to be here tonight, and to have this chance to speak about Alan Preston’s jewellery, and the book Between Tides. It is quite humbling to stand here before so many of Alan’s friends and colleagues, people who have been seeing his jewellery for over three decades. Some of you have watched this work being made in the studio; some of you have viewed it in exhibitions; some of you own it, and wear it, forging a very intimate relationship with the objects, claiming them, and Alan, in the triangle that links maker, jewellery and owner. In the face of such history, my own relatively short relationship with Alan’s jewellery is revealed to be a new courtship. Yet, as I hope Between Tides will demonstrate, I have made the most of Alan’s willingness to talk with me about his work and life, taking advantage of the compressed and intense experience of viewing a great deal of work over a few months, and having the luxury to think and write about what over thirty years of making jewellery means – to Alan, to other jewellers, to the history of contemporary jewellery in Aotearoa, and to me personally. I have felt the responsibility of it, and the privilege.
Alan Preston, Navigation Aid, 1995
I began the process of writing about Alan’s jewellery with a consideration of Navigation Aid, a pāua necklace that he first made in 1995. It is an elegant work, a series of elongated oval pāua elements that are made into crosses with silver pins, and then ‘hinged’ together with coconut-shell buttons and vau thread. The result is an articulated lattice of shimmering shell, a necklace that represents a high point of achievement in what might be called the Bone Stone Shell movement. It is a bravura performance in pāua, the natural material celebrated above all others by New Zealand jewellers in the 1980s. It draws on materials (coconut shell and vau, a thread made from hibiscus bark) and techniques (threading and weaving) that have strong connections to adornment in the wider Pacific. Yet – unlike earlier moments in Preston’s practice, and in the Bone Stone Shell movement generally – Navigation Aid is not closely tied to the models of Pacific personal adornment. This necklace is not a civavonovono or kap kap. While we could say it is tribal, we would mean this in a particularly modern sense, as representing the identity of a group of urban-dwelling New Zealanders who are politically progressive and proud to live in Aotearoa as part of the Pacific.
Stick chart, Marshall Islands
Preston’s title refers to a chance visual similarity between the lattice of pāua criss-crosses and the Marshallese stick chart in the collection of this museum, itself a lattice of sticks, shells and fibre created to aid navigation. Both are complex networks punctuated by elements at the points where the lines meet. And both are formally beautiful objects that are also symbols: one invokes the navigation knowledge of Pacific Islanders; and the other a more generalised set of ideas about identity, place and politics.
In the navigation aids used to guide voyagers between islands, materials did not play a significant role in meaning. In Preston’s Navigation Aid, materials are the key to meaning. A Marshallese stick chart could be made of anything and still guide Islanders across the Pacific ocean. In contrast the Navigation Aid necklace could not be made of anything and still retain its meaning. Its complexity emerges from the careful balancing of materials and techniques, and the patient investment of meaning and preciousness in these materials, which is at the heart of the Bone Stone Shell movement.
There is an elegant balance in the best of Preston’s work that, for me, is summed up in the Navigation Aid necklace. His work invites comparison with Pacific adornment and then challenges any simplistic description of what this relationship means, or how it is conducted. You will find many objects in this museum that claim kinship with Preston’s necklace; and you will not find another object in this museum that looks like Navigation Aid, or shares its particular materials or techniques of construction.
It is particularly exciting to be able to launch the book here at the Auckland Museum, and to see Preston’s jewellery alongside the Pacific objects that inspired him. I think it is right that Navigation Aid should lead us back here, to the Auckland Museum, and to the many cultural treasures of the Pacific amongst which Preston’s jewellery will stand for a few months. Between Tides is my attempt to account for the journey that Preston has been on for the past three decades, a road map to the various destinations he has visited, and a guide to the ways in which his travels have transformed contemporary jewellery in Aotearoa. No doubt you will form your own conclusions about the direction in which Navigation Aid and the rest of this jewellery leads you. But I have no doubt that you will wish to join me in celebrating the man who has made this journey possible, marking his trail with jewellery of sophistication, beauty and elegance, adornment that remains beguiling no matter how often you return to experience its pleasures.
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