Performative jewellery explores the realm of human relationships.

Kathy Ludwig at Galerie BSL takes us along on her trip of exploring human relationships through performative jewellery. Whether vampiric, parasitic or symbiotic these fascinating, beautiful pieces leave ephemeral decorative traces on the skin or fuse with their skin like tone with the rest of the body. Our relationship with jewellery is reinvented as the wearer becomes the host or victim for these objects.

Galerie BSL is presenting Kathy Ludwig’s ‘Hosting Parasites,’ a collection of performative jewellery belonging to the realms of art which earned her a first class honours degree from the Design Academy Eindhoven.

‘The objects that I create are intriguing, attractive and maybe even repulsive, provoking contradictory sentiments and raising questions. Their interaction with the body makes certain values or demeanour tangible. A living sculpture is formed from their unison.’

‘Hosting Parasites’ consists of three smoked oak cabinets of curiosities. Each of these presentation cases contains latex, ivory, fabric, silver and porcelain objects for experimenting with, which inhabit the user’s body/support, leaving behind its imprint or fusing with it. Here flesh is the actual, sublimated showpiece. Kathy Ludwig puts this territory to the test, examining without value judgement the parasitic or symbiotic character of any human relationship: to give; to receive; to conquer; to exploit; to benefit; to cooperate; to pool… to love.

In the first series, four pieces of white porcelain are inspired by parasites which slip beneath the skin. Attached to a part of the body with a silver thread, they leave an imprint of the parasite on the flesh, visually comparable to a fossil.

The four suckers in the second case embody the vampiric aspect of a relationship. These latex leeches leave a red mark on the body, an ephemeral and decorative trace bestowed by the sucking of the parasite.

The third series consists of three pieces which are skin like in tone and to the touch. Once worn, these imitations of parasitic bodies blend with the rest of the hand, the fingers becoming limbs with the sentiment of being part of one and the same body.

Kathy Ludwig (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) at Galerie BSL, 23 rue Charlot 75003 Paris, France, 2011. No part of this web site may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of Morfae and the copyright owner.