Clementine Edwards is an artist, editor and writer from Naarm/Melbourne based in Rotterdam. Her work is guided by the ongoing research line material kinship, which thinks kin beyond bloodlines and material beyond extraction.

Within the fellowship, Edwards has explored aesthetic strategies that map the connection between colonialism and the climate crisis. The project, which centres on the idea of the miniature, navigates artistic practices in which jewellery becomes an intimate, embodied and pertinent framework that is inextricably tied to femme, complex and anti-heroic work.

My starting point was the invitation from Jewellery – Linking Bodies to propose a project. The invitation precipitated the research. I’d taught a subject at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) a year earlier called Reframing Climate Colonialism—Pleasuring the Radical Imagination on the invitation of Casco Art Institute. Certainly this notion of making art with political intention—rather than doing the art first and seeing the politics follow, which is usually how I make—was leading my thinking, and that had been quite central to the subject I taught at DAI. Casco extended the teaching invitation to me because I’d been a part of a volunteer working group that they’d initiated that was cowriting and creating a climate justice code for arts institutions and arts practitioners in the Netherlands and beyond.

My approach has been one of total immersion but with a maker’s approach. I have been haunting the halls of Gerrit Rietveld Academie, particularly the Jewellery – Linking Bodies studios. I have been working alongside the students and getting to know the staff. (They're all amazing.) I have been dragging myself to jewelry suppliers outside of Amsterdam and hassling the metal workshop technicians, Pieter Elbers in particular. I have been getting a (minor) hang of some of the machinery and techniques available in Jewellery – Linking Bodies. I have been reading up on the materials I'm working with. I have been returning to metal fabrication. I have been becoming a rice artist. I have been looking at a ton of miniature and jewelry-related works and practices. I have been going to trade fairs and hobby shops, writing for a jewelry blog, and subscribing to Poppenhuizen & Miniaturen quarterly magazine.

It's been more of a cultural and aesthetic immersion than an “I'm going to the library” one (though at one point, I developed a researcher’s passion for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch doorknobs and table fittings). This approach is consistent with my general practice style: materially nerdy but not scholarly or rigorous.

Thank you, that’s kind! I’m not sure I’d personally agree with framing the materials as having been abused—many would, though—and I certainly wouldn’t limit responsibility for resource extraction to so-called western nations. However, I think what you’re getting at is this idea of how European colonial histories and presents are inextricably entwined with the drastically escalating climate crisis. It’s this idea of take, take, take—of human supremacy (over all life on Earth), of male supremacy, of white supremacy, of class and money and body and intellectual supremacy, and how that culture of supremacy leads to this taking. With those qualifiers in mind, I believe your question gets to the heart of my practice and the issues I'm dealing with.

I consider myself a studio artist; I adore making. And though I love to collaborate and research, I have little interest in being a research- or social-practice artist. As I learn more and delve deeper into the making process, I come across the question you pose. Life intrudes. So, how do you hold that life, those pressing politics and poetics? How do I acknowledge my position of being able to take and of being taken from? The short answer is that I'm busy with the “small” in scale and “crafty” in practice—and working with dear friends who can hold and reflect all that life interpersonally. That feels honest. Beyond the material, I’m increasingly interested in the ephemeral and affective: performance, writing, and teaching. These avenues have become vital for my explorations.