Photo: Louise Perrone, 2022 Applied Art + Design Award recipient
Louise Perrone designs jewellery that lives beyond adornment and speaks to innovation, re-purposing, and thoughtfulness. Recipient of the 2022 Applied Art + Design Award (AAD), this jeweller never planned to pursue this path. Despite that, she has left a significant mark in the world of fashion, design, and applied art, more than two decades after immigrating to Canada from her native UK.
BC Achievement, in preparation for the 2022 AAD awardees’ recognition, interviewed Louise for a short film highlighting her creative process, inspiration and vision for the future of her art. “I’m really interested in making things with my hands and using unconventional materials in an interesting way. One of the things about my work that I found is when I’m wearing it around other jewellers, from a distance they’re like ‘what is that made of’ and they want to come close and can’t figure out whether it’s metal or what it is.”
Louise’s textile jewellery explores issues of gender, labour, and sustainability by combining goldsmithing traditions with hand-sewing. Using materials derived from domestic and industrial textile and plastic waste, Louise’s work involves altering plastic objects and enveloping them in fabric, inviting a consideration of what jewellery can conceal and reveal about the maker, the wearer, and ourselves.
“I was making things from found objects like gloves that I picked up in the street, fabric, textiles all kinds of different materials. I was interested and I still am interested in how jewellery is a way of communicating ideas or meaning without having to.”
Her work is a representation of her sense of social responsibility to the world around her. “I’m not interested in making things that already exist or adding to the enormous pile of waste that is already there I’d rather take from that pile of waste and reduce it a little bit and actually draw attention to that pile of waste.”
Louise’s pieces have been shown in numerous local, national, and international exhibitions, including solo and two-person shows at the Craft Council of BC, and group exhibitions featured in New York City Jewelry Week, JOYA Barcelona, and Athens Jewellery Week.
This designer is passionate about teaching her skills to others and works as an instructor in the jewellery programs at LaSalle College Vancouver and Vancouver Community College.
She’s also motivated to create opportunities for artists to thrive and has given back to her community by serving in leadership positions with various artist and craft organizations. “For me my practice is not about selling product, but it is about contributing to ideas about what jewellery can be; about adornment about the value of materials and the value of labour of peoples’ work which is so undervalued.”
Louise’s plans for the future of her art practice involve going back to her roots. “The way I put things together is very informed by my previous life as a jeweller and metalsmith so now I’m going back in the opposite direction and I’m going to be using those textile techniques in metal, so I’m really excited about that.”
Watch the short film on the 2022 Applied Art + Design Award recipients on our YouTube channel and prepare to be inspired.
The recipients of the 2023 Applied Art + Design Award will be announced in October at bcachievement.com and shared across all of our social media channels.
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