STORY EDMUND WEE | IMAGES WILLIAM GULLETTE Drawing on a tradition of fine Scandinavian craftsmanship, Arline Fisch's pioneering style sees metal as fabric, where jewellery and the body have a strong correlation.
ARLINE Fisch is a generalist and she eschews labels. Given a choice between artist, metalsmith, jeweller or designer, she would rather be seen as "an artist who makes ornaments to wear".
She describes her signature style best: "Metal is hard, fabric is soft, yet the two can interrelate to allow new concepts to develop. I am intrigued by the idea that metal can be soft to the touch at the same time that it maintains a structured form, a visual contradiction that poses many questions. When is a bracelet a piece of clothing? When is it a costume? When does it become a piece of jewellery? What is this cuff of knitted metal?"
Melding contradictions best sums up her dazzling compositions: soft with the hard, metal and fabric, old with the new, animate versus inanimate. Through these, Fisch endeavours to draw you into her elegant fantasies, with poetic monikers like 'Woven Curl and Pleated Silver', 'Gold Flowers', and 'Lion's Mane Jellyfish'.
But the stylish tags of her creations stop short at simply being marketing tools. Rather, she injects real, credible dimension to her designs by bridging the past with the present as she seeks out forgotten treasures from Mother Nature's museums in the far-reaching crannies around the world; from the European Medieval milieu to the Pre-Columbian era.
Her 'Bracelet and Glove', inspired by the ancient Incans, is startlingly haunting. Standing upright, as if hoisted by a phantom strength, the cranberry-coloured layers of sleeve fabric covering the arm ruffle out like the outstretched torso of a French accordian. The remaining appendage is the connecting glove, also brandished with a life-like spirit.
In another well-inspired piece titled 'Egyptian Princess', this designer paid homage to the Pyramid architects and Mayan arch priests by cobbling together a fine-silver pleated collar fronted by a seeming gold stairway leading up to an elevated Mexican royal tomb.
There is a strong correlation between the jewellery and the body, as Fisch transforms the former to drape the wearer like a second skin. Coupled with precious metals and stones, her anthropologically-oriented use of recurring motifs - fans, feathers, springs, aluminium, bone and even animals - imbues the designer's creations with a theatrical aura.
As simple as her manifold designs may look, a scrutiny of their fabric's interlaced structure will indicate otherwise. The 'Bracelet and Glove' was painstakingly knitted with coated red copper wire using modified, low-tech knitting machines originally used to produce socks, thus rendering it relatively feather-weight vis-Ö-vis conventional, weighty metal jewellery. And herein lies Fisch's niche, her pioneering style of using metal as fabric - whether through knitting, crocheting, plaiting or weaving.
For someone whose craft has evolved over more than four decades - her jewellery has exhibited around the world almost every year since 1955 and her work has appeared in collections worldwide, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Vatican Museum in Rome, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC - surprisingly, Fisch did not set out to be trained in the metalsmith trade from the beginning. She first received a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art from Skidmore College, a small women's college in New York. Later, as she wanted to teach, she pursued a Master's in Art from the University of Illinois at Urbana. This was the time when she, enamoured with jewellery, abandoned studio painting as her major. "I switched from painting to metal because it seemed to suit my aesthetic needs better and (also) because I enjoyed greater success," she reveals with probity.
It's not hard to sniff out a European uniqueness in her artistry, an element attributed to her Scandinavian rite of passage. In the '50s, she sallied forth for Copenhagen's School of Arts and Crafts after bagging the first of four Fulbright scholarships she would be awarded throughout her career. There, she learnt how to wield the Danish's metalsmithing legacy of function orientation, style simplicity and precise worksmanship; as archetypically defined by silversmith maestro Georg Jensen. "My first year in Denmark was focused on learning technical things since my background in working in metal was so limited."
In the mid '60s, her subsequent scholarship to Denmark was more edifying. "I spent much time at the National Museum in Copenhagen studying and drawing the Viking and Mongolian collections, both of which had a great influence on the large scale jewellery I was making, and the combining of jewellery and clothing in an integrated fashion," she reveals.
But Fisch has no desire for 'technical perfection'; precision in measurement and the immaculate finishing touch. Steering away from the style of the purists, she espouses the 'means-to-an-end' method, where the focus is on the product rather than a punctilious observance of technique. Braiding together Danish techniques with her historically-hinged conceptual abstractions, she soon wrought out her own nascent, contemporary style.
All this took place in the midst of a maelstrom of evolving standards. As a new international art jewellery movement brewed in the '60s, the definition of jewellery (including traditional jewellery techniques) gradually changed from mere ornaments to art worn close to the body. As Fisch continued to explore her own methodology, she unwittingly became one of the most visible and influential forces of this nouvelle vague. In fact, she pioneered the application of textile techniques to sculptural work in metal and created dramatic, large-scale body sculptures that pushed the boundaries between jewellery and dresses.
But ironically, there seems to be a self-denigrating tone about her notion of body sculptures. "I don't think of the body as a pedestal for a piece of sculpture," she opines. "Most people's definition of jewellery is of something small, worn on the fingers, ears or attached to a piece of clothing. My own definition of jewellery is an adornment for a person. Something worn on the body that enhances the person." Spoken like a generalist indeed. S
