Display | 2010
Precious world | 2008
Wild Ocean | 2011
Fukushima mon amour | 2013
Rencontre 16 | 2012
Toison d'or II | 2013
The TWEEX 1 project
An overview of knowledge transmitted by masters of "designer jewellery" at St. Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp, IATA (Namur) and La Cambre (Brussels).
With participation of the artist
Félix Roulin.
Past exhibition
TWEEX 1
from 26.04.2013
to 25.05.2013
Opening: 25.04.2013
From 18:00 to 21:00
TWEEX 1 catalog
St. Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp
Photo: Hilde De Decker
St. Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp is the university-level department of visual and audiovisual arts of the Karel de Grote-Hogeschool in Antwerp. It is part of the joint academic project of the Antwerp University Association (AUHA).
St. Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp offers a choice of four full-length study levels – ranging from baccalaureates through master’s degrees and post-graduate research on art and design to an arts doctorate.
In particular, the baccalaureate in goldsmithing and jewellery focuses on developing artistic work and experimentation through the choice of various materials and techniques. Contemporary jewellery and objects are seen as bearers of meaning.
The master’s in in goldsmithing and jewellery concentrates on developing more advanced techniques, as well as helping students to create their own niche in the artistic world.
Research into the meaning of objects as a channel for communicating and developing a personal vision lies at the heart of the training given in Sint Lucas Antwerp.
For Hilde De Decker, Hilde Van der Heyden and Pia Clauwaert, teachers of contemporary jewellery, revealing an artist’s particular signature through jewellery or objects, and enabling artists to turn their ideas into realities, whatever may be the technique and materials needed to give them concrete form, are essential parts of the teaching at St. Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp.
IATA, Namur
Institut d’enseignement des Arts, Techniques, Sciences et Artisanats
Photo: Bernard François
Located in Namur, IATA is a technical and vocational secondary school offering 23 study options. One of these is a jewellery programme available from the second level of vocational training onwards. At the end of the third level, after 7 years, the students are awarded an upper secondary education certificate, together with a supplementary vocational qualification.
From 1988 to 2011, the 16 hours of practical work per week in the jewellery programme included 4 to 8 hours devoted
to contemporary creations. Bernard François and Gwennaël Therasse taught this module.
The complementary seventh year enables the students to hone their skills. Backed by a vocational qualification and the experience gained on work placements and international exchanges, they develop their creativity through their own personal works of art.
IATA took over the Ecole d’Art de Maredsous in the early 1960s. The quality of this heritage is attracting more and more foreign students, as well as young adults with baccalaureates or degrees who wish to retrain for a freestanding artistic field that is both aesthetic and concrete.
The Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels of La Cambre, Brussels
Photo: Marion Beernaerts
Founded in 1927 by the architect and decorator Henry van de Velde, the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels of La Cambre is one of Belgium’s foremost schools of design and art. There are some 700 students in its 17 departments and art options: ceramics, animation, drawing, urban design, engraving and the printed image, painting, photography and sculpture, but also an art restoration department and, in the design field, modules on industrial design and textile design, paper and book design (bookbinding), interior architecture, stage set design, fashion design and creation, and two graphics departments.
Courses on various transversal art techniques are also available to all the students: digital arts, video, performance, illustration, accessories, etc. As well as the artistic training, the students receive a thorough theoretical and technical grounding, both general and specialised, and they are encouraged to go on outside placements: Erasmus, artists’ assistants, work experience in art centres, agencies or firms, etc.
The courses take five years, divided into two study cycles: bachelor’s and
master’s. The school also offers postgraduate courses leading to teaching qualifications, as well as preparation for a doctorate in arts and art sciences, organised in cooperation with the university.
La Cambre is an art college run by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. It is a member of the Brussels-Wallonia University Pole and a partner, within the transdisciplinary ARTes platform, of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and the INSAS (cinema and theatre). Many other partnerships, whether national or international, institutional, educational, artistic, socio-cultural, industrial or commercial, feed into its teaching and are part of its structure.
This partnership dynamic, as well as a first project on parures and jewellery creation in Brussels and Wallonia in which La Cambre’s design students were involved, is the background to the invitation from the contemporary art jewellery gallery "vander A" to Marion Beernaerts, the teacher in charge of the Industrial Design course, to take part in the TWEEX project, together with her students. This project was proposed to the students in the three bachelor's degree years and supervised by the teachers and designers Marion Beernaerts, Marianne Bernecker and Lucile Soufflet.
Photo © Nicolas van Haaren
Industrial Design training
at La Cambre
Author: Marion Beernaerts
Industrial Design training at La Cambre draws on a broad mix of art courses and technical courses that are specific to this profession's know-how.
The initial opening up to art is stimulated by a set of courses that are common to all of the college’s students. However, the Industrial Design option sharpens its teaching focus by installing its search and experimentation engines, just like a laboratory in which "knowing how to think" and “knowing how to do” are gradually but inevitably merged.
Many different, complementary projects are chosen each year in order to strike
the right academic balance between art and technique, content and form, functionality and ergonomics, while constantly valuing the reflection that gives meaning to the project.
The parure project is one of those topics entailing a search for strong, particular signs that ally the effects of matter to form and vice versa, providing the student with a crucible for the research and experimentation that go into the conception of any innovative industrial product.
The blend of different personalities within the teaching team, who are all active professional designers, fully contributes to this process of opening, which will subsequently enable each student to steer his or her artistic and technical course in full autonomy.
Photo © Nicolas van Haaren
A teaching profile
at La Cambre
Author: Marianne Bernecker
What matters, as a designer and teacher, is to keep on broadening the creative context, so as to open up the spaces for investigation and research that the brain needs in order to stimulate new synaptic connections. Once this training process has been activated, then creativity can flow freely and the propositions that it generates will be fed by multiple confluences – that underground womb from which all topical figures are born -
I teach a transversal approach to all the design disciplines, which essentially draws on the language of plasticity: colour, matter, form, volume, space. This is the humus in which a budding creator grows.
After this kind of immersion, the process can be rechanneled by concentrating on conception criteria that are very specific to the design field concerned – in this case, industrial design - and understanding the fundamentals of what distinguishes a designer from an engineer.
