Edgar Mosa

Edgar Mosa:

That is correct, funny to master putting 26 years of one’s life in one single sentence.
I have last landed in New York, about a year ago. Thinking through the experiences of yet it feels as if I have been here a long time already, though if I guide myself trough memory, it seems like I haven’t left Detroit. Or Amsterdam, for that matter. Neither have I left the great people that I have met along the way, that have made me. I miss them a lot. I think life has given me many good things I would have not achieved what I have this far, had I not sought the right advice and have gotten the good support from my superiors and my peer group.

E.M.:

Yes that was at the Degree Show at Galerie Marzee. I remember very well meeting you. That project started a year before, when I spent about a month working with local craftspeople in Nepal. It may not have ended yet, as I keep on collecting broken jewelry to this day. And, of course, lots of rubbish.
Back then I was concerned with sustainability, and admiring some jerry-rig solutions, MacGyver Style. I have this memory of countless objects my grandmother used to mend, such as cracked metal buckets, poked and stitched together with thread. My grandfather carved his toothpicks out of used matches. Genius. So, I took the challenge of going to Nepal in search of these kinds of self-thought techniques, un-institutionalized, unique. And to experience peoples loose appropriation of materials, not minding aesthetics, but purpose. In the end, nothing is waste, all is potential.

Once I got back to Amsterdam, I sought to apply a similar method to jewelry that I had purchased from flea markets. God knows I love those! Mmm.. My friends know better. Every day I had a small package with a note on my desk, or on my mailbox. Unwanted-out-of-fashion-damaged bits and pieces of small treasures, often carefully wrapped in silk paper or bubble wrap. The work seemed best finished even before it began. I think that collection became, in the end, a portrait of Amsterdam and Nepal. And what has recently started to become a discussion in the art and craft academia, ‘regionalism’. It was about combining specificity of materials, of techniques. An archive of things that will eventually perish; as much as the pieces which have a very ephemeral quality in them. What I mean is that, for instance, you can trace a candy wrap from the famous Dutch store HEMA in one of my pieces, as you can find a woven pattern used in Nepal for basket making.
After this, geographical narrative became a subject matter to my work, not conceptually nor methodically, just in the way I chose my sources of material and techniques. They bend and shift. Sometimes they re-appear. These are usually guilty pleasures.

E.M.:

I am a sucker for

1.) Personal narratives, and

2.) Those, who push themselves out of their comfort zones and cultural norms.
I love Iris. And it’s hard for me to tell if I am more of a fan or of a lover. But if I’d have to choose, I’d choose the latter. Iris is my jewelry affair, and above anything that she may have thought me or infused me with, she showed me how to love things, be touched by them. She has, as she always does, with everything she handles, introduced me to accepting my own vulnerability, and it’s essential role onto doing that what we do. She also confirmed a theory of mine: you work the way you cook.
Manon always reminds me, and makes me believe that what we do has good reason and relevance. She makes jewelry out of jewelry, and toys around with seriousness in an ingenious way. I think it is partially thanks to her that I have kept on making jewelry, giving up on choreography school for good. She is extremely professional and efficient, and will certainly indicate you the right track of reason, quality, and desire.

E.M.:

Hahaha. Well, at a certain point that sentence took a new form, backstage, and oftentimes mentioned in mockery among my colleagues: ‘Trees are like people – you never know when they’re gonna slap you in the face.’
That is quite straightforward; every kind of relationship requires interest, dosage of character, and a lot of labor.
I spent a winter in the woods, wrapped in a ski suit, armed with a saw, lots of sand paper. In the wilderness, thoughts get a lot clearer; especially if you are thinking of design, form. The work became a dialogue of mood and reciprocity with the dead trees I chose to cut down, the simplicity of assembly, and the time consuming labor to their polished finish.
I have been talking to trees for a while now and it is not always that we understand each other. Relationships in life, with places, people and mirrors, are just like that.

E.M.:

Mmm… there we go, the ‘guilty pleasures’. Well, one thing that is inherited from work to work is a sense of measurement. Whether by often presenting modular units, or placing the body in an environment, as an idea, a definition of scale. But this is not something I seek to return to, I believe it to happen more intuitively. Now, if you are asking me about what makes me do what I do, what keeps me going… I suppose it would be the fact that I am deeply seduced by the things I hate. Discomfort, and the awareness of limitations is a constant drive. This is, clearly, what makes them Guilty Pleasures – the secrecy of my passion beneath my own moral judgment. This is why, for instance, my body of work ‘Covers’ references Fashion Jewelry, and also why I chose to come and live in the most money-driven city. I guess I’d have to go back to the word vulnerability, but choose not to tell you my weaknesses…
All I know is that our enemies can tell a great deal about ourselves.

E.M.:

With ‘Covers’ I sought to, trough a lens of a contemporary artist, make homage to costume jewelry – ornament, the intuitive. And craft as a source of meaning, a rational value.
What you are buying is a labored idea, and both a re-invention and artifact.
The name ‘covers’ came from the fact that at the beginning of the project I was literally covering the pieces, by pouring plaster over them, taping, wrapping, bonding. I had to make sure that the unwanted use of ornament was obliterated. A ‘cover’ is also the name given to an existing composed song, sang with your own voice and rhythm.
Jeanette Winterson wrote in her latest book entitled ‘Why be happy when you can be normal’: ‘When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.’
Have you ever experienced growing up as a gay boy in the sexist society of the early nineties in Portugal? There is an anthropological message to the work, one that I chose to tell on my own terms, trough my own experience, a little naive, a little dramatic, just as it ought to.

E.M.:

Ah.. well.. give me a moment, let me wrap my brain around this, I have to go back on time a bit..
(…)
Well, let me say first that I felt a kick in the stomach when you said that the conceptual interest wore off. But yes I have to agree: the conceptual interest is not there, only the conceptual drive remains. Perhaps with ‘The Mountain’, at some point along the way, I stopped thinking about pleasing my audience. I did stop thinking, and with it started giving way to feeling, making. It felt like I was dancing again. The whole collection is so labor intensive, and there is so much of material exploration, yet, always around the same material (wood). I think that this project pushed me further in understanding where I was, as a craftsperson in America. Looking back now, it probably is a body of work that reflects what American jewelry is to me – the concern of expertise, the value of time in labor, the fabrication of nature, or freezing an image of that what appears natural.
But in the end, the jewelry maker, like the choreographer, needs to know the dancer, to dance, touch, and be, an absolute. I could defend that I was more interested in making a cross-disciplinary work rather than commenting on the jewelry field alone. But I would be lying. I was simply, not thinking.

E.M.:

Beads, table legs, cast brass. When you face up the sun with eyes closed, and then, when opening them up, gaze forwards. Everything you see has a misty halo, followed by a sharp light. That, that moment of sweet confusion. The moment that precedes the welcoming vulnerability.

E.M.:

I first came to New York because I had to. It would be nonsensical to come study in America and not explore the land, specially this State. After my studies, I decided to move here. It was the first time that I chose not to prioritize my work, and made a choice for myself, for my life. Sometimes its good to follow your gut and choose life, allowing you to make mistakes, keeping you challenged. There was anxiety, and oftentimes there has been panic. But it keeps me on my toes. When I asked Iris if it was the right decision for me to pursue, she said that doing the right thing is not always the right thing to do. It was settled.