Emma: Observations from day 3

1st March.

The Stedelijk museum was the first place we ventured to today. It's the modern and contemporary art museum in Amsterdam and had an incredibly large, broad range of art spread across the older and newer wings. The most time I spent here was in the design section of the museum where there was furniture, jewellery, posters, ceramics, glass work etc from 1900 onwards. There were some really interesting pieces that used materials in a different way to what I've seen. There was a lacquered copper vase, patinated copper, an interesting woven piece by Ria Van Eyk made from PVC and polythene.

There was also an exhibition on Mike Kelley's life work - he was insane but there was some amazing art. The artwork below was one of my favourites - he start with an image of (i think) trees and tree roots) and expanded it outwards.

Infinite Expansion 1983

acrylic on paper, super imposed

6 parts

The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

The work in Terhi Tolvanen's 'Curiousity Collection' at Rob Koudijs' gallery was probably my favourite so far. I found Tolvanen's use of materials really fascinating because of the way she made pieces of jewellery look like they came fr the bottom of the ocean - which fits with what i think is a reference to the Curiousity Cabinets that were popular and usually filled with shells, flora and other naturally found souvenirs.

To make rust she ground up a composite of stones, sand and other materials and mixed this with a glue (not quite sure what Rob told us, maybe a polyurethane or something) and applied it to the structure. A coral necklace (I'll find the name of the piece and get back to you) was a wooden structure that had strings of small pink pearls attached to the edge. Tolvanen then filled in the surrounds with concrete. You would expect this necklace to be quite heavy but because the middle is hollow, the piece was actually quite light weight. A client came into the gallery and tried it on too, it looked beautiful on the body! A lot of the work had some really interesting findings (hinges, catches etc) and it all fit together as a collection of work.

Antoinette 2013

Pearls, cement, wood, silver