Ramon Puig Cuyás, Silvia Walz, Judy McCaigh

Travel is essential for Judy McCaigh, who was born in Edinburgh and has lived in Barcelona since 1991. From the deserts of New Mexico to far-flung locations in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, she explores exotic landscapes, discloses secrets and experiences surprises: for example, a trash container with the quality of a sculpture, which inspired her to create a series of brooches. “Recurrent symbols appear in my work, fragments of landscapes, micro worlds – narrative, personal, like a traveler’s diary,” this jewelry artist says.

Judy McCaigh, brooch The Space between, 2017. German silver, tombac, gold leaf, gold mosaic

Like Ramon Puig Cuyás and Silvia Walz, Judy McCaigh numbers among those artists whose pieces of jewelry are autonomous works of art. Such artworks are not defined by the value of their materials, but solely by their aesthetic presence, their message and its underlying history. One of the pioneers in this genre is Ramon Puig Cuyás, who was a professor at Escola Massana in Barcelona from 1977 to 2016. He likens his pieces to the golden plaque aboard the Voyager spacecraft, which carries information about our civilization into the vastness of outer space, or to a letter inside a corked bottle, which was thrown into the sea by a shipwrecked sailor. “My creations are accordingly messages to the world, coupled with the hope that someone will take an interest in them and understand the mysteries that all artworks harbor.”

Ramon Puig Cuyás, brooch, series The Sounds of the Hearth, 2017. Oxidized nickel silver, enamel on steel, reconstructed white coral, basalt

Silvia Walz, who comes from the Gelsenkirchen in Germany, likewise taught at Escola Massana in Barcelona. This jewelry artist had long regarded cloisonné enamel as taboo – until she discovered that “one needn’t necessarily imprison it inside little partitions, but can also use it to form larger planes.” Numerous experiments preceded the “Porta-skies,” “Parable” and “Broken Sky” series of brooches, with which Silvia Walz approaches the moving phenomenon of light, capturing “moments of light to transform them into wearable objects and useful amulets,” she says.

Silvia Walz, brooch Parable 1. Steel, enamel, transfer

Silvia Walz, brooch from the series Portaskies, Thunderstorm 1. Steel, enamel, transfer

Anyone who would like to view great art jewelry during the Munich Jewelry Days will find exactly what they’re looking for at Petra Waibel-Grotjans’ and Elke Sunder Plassmann’s Galerie tal20.