The whole lot Is Already – Artwork Jewellery Discussion board
On Might 19, 2025, Lam de Wolf handed away on the age of 76. As a toddler she was referred to as Loes, as an artist she used the title Lam (her initials), and within the house the place she spent her final years she grew to become Lammy. She was a persona, even when phrases started to fail her. For individuals who knew her effectively, she was each a lamb and a wolf. She was an essential innovator of Dutch jewellery and visible artwork, and an lively and outspoken lady, artist, and trainer. Her work was acknowledged as pioneering and she or he had a wide ranging vitality and velocity of working and renewing. Textile was on the coronary heart of Lam’s work. It was the start and the tip.
Textile is the primary materials encounter of a human being—wrapped in fabric or wearing a romper, a new child is offered to the world. In a wicker basket, lined with colourful patches, Lam started her ultimate journey. No flowers, no wreaths—however a donation of materials on her basket was requested. That’s how she envisioned her ultimate goodbye, for which she had already designed an “adieu” brand with a black coronary heart lengthy earlier than she grew to become in poor health.
Textile is a cloth that’s near folks and serves many capabilities. It could actually preserve you heat and provides consolation. It’s sensible, helpful, foldable, and versatile, appropriate for handkerchiefs, sheets, and curtains, as tablecloths and cleansing rags, and as clothes. Lam was all the time wearing lovely clothes (Yohji Yamamoto was her favourite designer), sneakers, and hats. In her work she was notably within the mundanity of textiles, which she mixed freely with different supplies utilizing versatile sticks and rubber tubes, paint, nails, staples, paper, plastic, and so forth. She gave performances with wearable grids fabricated from sticks and tubes, and made spatial jewellery in addition to monumental wall installations and sculptures.
Lam was not a jewellery artist pur sang, nor was she a textile artist. She was quite a visible and phrase artist. On the academy she created giant objects in addition to brooches and wearable objects with a fundamental geometric kind utilized in performances—all constituted of Mikado (from the sport of pick-up sticks) and different sticks related with silicone tubing. Dimension couldn’t maintain her again, nor perform, nor vacation spot. From the onset it was clear Lam didn’t slot in a field and didn’t like being pigeonholed.
After graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Monumental Textile Division, in 1981, she entered the jewellery world convincingly, leaving a long-lasting impression on everybody who encountered her work. Her first present was held at Galerie RA, in the summertime of 1981, instantly after her commencement, and lots of extra would observe within the subsequent a long time. Lam and RA’s gallerist, Paul Derrez, remained devoted to one another—even when she didn’t make jewellery anymore and focused on monumental and different visible artwork, which might additionally take the type of trousers, skirts, or puppets. Stunning publications accompanied her work the complete manner, demonstrating her hand, her decisions, and her concepts.
Within the Nineteen Eighties she was a part of a brand new and inspirational motion in modern jewellery instigated by British and Dutch artists who had been all for flexibility, shade, and tender supplies. Lam referred to as her first jewellery Wearable Objects, and they also had been—although not easy-to-wear objects. She made bundles of repeating shapes, arcs, circles, squares, and triangles from sticks, wrapped with coloured and dyed strips of textile. In case somebody actually wished to put on a bit, she hooked up a protracted strand of dyed textile that resulted in a bit ball. The wearer might carry that ball in her pocket as a stress reliever. Some Wearable Objects might be closed on the again by tying lengthy strips of textile collectively. Different items had been worn throughout the physique—one arm might be casually inserted via the sticks within the building. She had implausible images taken of her items, worn by her favourite mannequin to transmit the probabilities of sporting and the reference to the physique. Probably the most extravagant piece from this 1982 sequence encompassed the entire physique from neck and shoulder to knees, like a form of exterior skeleton. In sporting a Lam de Wolf necklace, you carried out the piece.
The jewellery that adopted consisted solely of colourful and painted ribbon, knotted collectively to kind items that regarded like cloaks or stoles. Caps and collars fabricated from painted silk and head and shoulder items combining painted textiles and wooden or iron additionally happened. Generally the textile was starched with glue, relying on what the design wanted.
The freshness of the colours she used and the baroqueness of the shapes was spectacular—particularly inside the confines of the quite austere and strict Dutch jewellery context. There have been references to Seventeenth-century collars and costumes, however nothing too literal, nothing too apparent.
Round 1988–1990 she step by step moved to larger-scale autonomous work. All through her profession the grid was there, spatially to make her early objects wearable or used for performances, and as a linear and largely sq. or rectangular base on the wall for pins, on which small patches had been hooked up with threads, knots, or tie-wraps. The grid supplied order in compositions with fringes, cords, knots, and different irregularities, and have become fully self-explanatory within the Hand Pc wall work made of colourful textile rolls. Generally her wall works[1] are like intriguing and complex allusions to the De Stijl interval in Dutch artwork of the Nineteen Twenties. However her work was a lot freer and softer, utilizing humble homespun-like supplies reminiscent of textile strips, plastic foil, and even handkerchief borders, in addition to needles, and it was as robust as will be—a liberation from sober traces and geometry.
Lam favored a pictorial method, portray textiles in contemporary colours and utilizing them in compositions on the crossroads of two- and three-dimensionality. She by no means felt diminished by working with textiles. Quite the opposite, Lam made the viewer conscious of the great thing about easy issues: fringes, borders, threads had been like her signature. She might dangle painted patches from a line fabricated from wooden and rubber in such a manner that the patches appeared to bop like laundry flapping on a clothesline within the wind.
In 2004 Lam began her formidable Sinnerokken sequence, referencing the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century literary custom of De Rhederijkers (Rhetoricians) and their Sinnespelen, which had been poetical performs based mostly on an aphorism or a phrase with an ethical which means. Lam’s Sinnerokken had been lengthy tube-shaped skirts on which she embroidered texts together with coloured areas. The textual content fragments had been rigorously chosen from songs, poems, novels, and essays by Dutch and worldwide authors. These skirts had been like delicate messages for the wearer. For the opening of her exhibition, at Galerie RA, in February 2004, she invited folks to stroll in one among her skirts. I walked in a single too. Perhaps I used to be too nervous then, however I see solely now that the textual content embroidered on it’s “Parlando,” a music textual content by the Dutch artist Freek de Jonge about “whereas we nonetheless can, take heed to tales from our mom, hugging her, feeding her with small bites of affection.”[2] The textual content was so relevant to me on the time. This exhibition at RA additionally included her IJzeren Woorden (Iron Phrases) stapled on handkerchiefs, boxed, signed, and numbered. A phrase isn’t the identical when you understand what it seems like in irregular iron letters on a bit of material.
Over time, language and phrases grew to become more and more essential and eventually took on an impartial position in Lam’s work. Phrases had been like small poems, though she herself didn’t name them that. She invented phrases and turned phrases into picture, performed with phrases, unravelled them like she unravelled textiles and paper. Or she remoted syllables, turned them round, learn from again to entrance, dissecting phrases and thus producing new emphases, discovering new connections and new meanings. Her poetry (I wish to name it that) and the artwork works she referred to as “line phrases” are associative, transferring, and humorous, they usually make you assume. Examples embody eindeloos hetzelfde en geen ogenblik gelijk (endlessly the identical and no second alike) and alles is al (all the pieces is already), the final sentence repeated 9 occasions in succession. This work was created in 2012 for the College of Amsterdam. The phrases in easy capital letters had been made in lacquered movie (a foil) and fixed with pins in a grid.
There’s a lot extra to jot down in regards to the work of this overpowering artist. How she cherished the alternate with the viewers, how curious she was, how she would ship inquiries to folks like “what urgent query have you ever all the time wished to ask me?” and “was there extra in me than might be seen?,” how she preferred to offer one thing away in alternate for solutions or participation in different methods, how she embroidered numerous second-hand handkerchiefs with a phrase or a couple of and picked up these in a printed Zakdoeken Boekje (Handkerchief Ebook, 2008). Lam’s work is crammed with associations, and meanings that also speak to us—time and again. Her work is in lots of museum and personal collections. Hopefully they are going to be proven to the general public recurrently, as a result of her work is timeless and unforgettable. CODA Museum has introduced that later this 12 months it’ll semi-permanently set up one among Lam’s favourite wall works—LangzaamEenzaamEenssaamSamenEe
Word
Lam de Wolf collaborated with a number of skilled photographers over successive durations: Hogers & Versluys, Tom Haartsen, and René Gerritsen. She was in all probability one of many first artists to care about skilled and inventive documentation of her jewellery. Hogers & Versluys used a particular mannequin who wore the jewellery, and Lam did the styling.
Pictures was nonetheless analog and costly. Digital images grew to become mainstream solely round 2000. The primary shade images Lam had taken (by Hogers & Versluys) had been slides, made with a Hasselblad 6 x 6 digital camera. This can be a distinctive materials (no negatives) and supplied the highest quality for printing. Nonetheless, as I wrote this remembrance it was very troublesome to search out good pictures of her work. There ought to be a Lam de Wolf archive stuffed with the best slides, however its location stays unclear, though many individuals have been searching for it. The CODA Museum Apeldoorn holds a Lam de Wolf archive, but it surely doesn’t include the big skilled slides.
This is the reason we determined to incorporate some smartphone images of spreads from Lam’s e book Monumentaal en Dichtbij (Voetnoot Publishers, Amsterdam, 2009). They aren’t supreme, however function a concession to offer the reader a greater impression of how her work fused with the physique.
My heartfelt because of everybody who helped me in my search: Jos Houweling, Paul Derrez, Carin Reinders (director of CODA), Els Drummen (curator at CODA), Anneke Pijnappels (Voetnoot), Tom Haartsen, and Rob Versluys.
We welcome your feedback on our publishing, and can publish letters that interact with our articles in a considerate and well mannered method. Please submit letters to the editor electronically; accomplish that right here. The web page on which we publish Letters to the Editor is right here.
© 2025 Artwork Jewellery Discussion board. All rights reserved. Content material is probably not reproduced in complete or partially with out permission. For reprint permission, contact data (at) artjewelryforum (dot) org
[1] See as an example Muurwerk (Wall Piece), 1990, silk, paper, wooden, 94 ½ x 55 inches (240 x 140 cm); Organza, 1995, organza, plastic, pins, 78 ¾ x 78 ¾ inches (200 x 200 cm); Muurwerk (Wall Piece), 1993, textile cords, plastic, 55 x 47 ¼ inches (140 x 120 cm); and Leeg (Empty), 1996, handkerchief borders, fabric of gold.
[2] Freely drawn from Freek de Jonge, Parlando—nu Het Nog Kan, carried out at Theater Carré, in Amsterdam, along with the Metropole orchestra, 2002.
