Nelson-born jeweller Warwick Freeman says “materials are my words” and he has been speaking the language of expression and identity through his applied-art practice since the early 1970s. Internationally recognised and locally loved for his contemporary work, he has received many accolades throughout his career, most recently the John Britten Black Pin at the Best Awards, the highest accolade presented by the Designers Institute of New Zealand. Homestyle caught up with Warwick to see what drives his continous exploration…
Your work has been described as redefining what jewellery can be. How do you explain it to someone encountering it for the first time? Not Michael Hill.
You’ve worked as a jeweller in Aotearoa for more than five decades. What keeps the act of making compelling? An adage that often goes with that question is: ‘I don’t know how to do anything else’ — which is a fair enough answer in my case. But a more sophisticated version of that would be that two things motivate artists: enough talent and exigency — what they can do, and what they must.
You’ve often worked independently, quietly building a significant body of work over many years. What does a good day in the studio look like for you? Not breaking what I’m making, not injuring myself, not ruining good materials and maybe best of all, leaving something on the bench at the end of the day that has enough promise to last until the next.
Many of your pieces use familiar forms such as hooks, hearts, hands and stars, yet they feel continually renewed. What draws you back to these symbols and what space do they create for new ideas? Despite their life as clichés, they can carry a lot of cultural weight.
I think that life as a cliché makes them a challenge to use, but that challenge is always how to make them your own, renew them, you might say. Make them after your own heart.
You’ve said your materials often come from “what’s underfoot”. What role does locality and found material play in shaping your work? A big one. Every material has the possibility of jewellery in it. [I’ve used] 60 different materials so far and counting. The work Dust (2012) captures the residue of making with different materials over 40 years. ‘Underfoot’ is usually Aotearoa for obvious reasons, but it can be from anywhere in the world. Every material can have a particular narrative attached to the place you found it — like volcanic scoria has to Auckland, and I use it with that specific meaning. North Cape to Bluff (2007) is all about where the material was found: it’s a series of rings made from stones collected while travelling the length of the country.
Has your way of seeing the landscape (or what you take from it) changed over time? My ‘take’ is pretty minimal in the scheme of things, but I’ve always believed there’s no difference to making your jewellery out of gold or paper. There’s no precious and non-precious hierarchy: it’s all precious and we’re all implicated whether the material is gold or paper. Somewhere there’s a hole in the ground with your name on it. As Allen Curnow wrote, ‘all earth one island’. It seems we’re learning that fact the hard way.
Jewellery often sits at the intersection of the personal and the cultural. How conscious are you of that tension when you’re making? Jewellery is just another marker of how we present ourselves to the world. I like that it is very personal. Unlike a painting in your home, it’s an art form that steps out into the world with you. The distance between yourself and the object is as close as it can get.
Hook Hand Heart Star brings together five decades of your work. How did you approach revisiting and recontextualising these pieces for this exhibition? We resisted the usual method of doing a survey exhibition — arranging the work chronologically — and instead looked across the five decades for themes that allowed works from an early decade to share the same space in the exhibition as a work from more recent times. It was more honest to how my practice works; it’s not linear and I am constantly circling back on myself and finding something new in an old theme.
What was it like working with Petra Hölscher at Die Neue Sammlung in Munich and Objectspace’s Kim Paton and Bronwyn Lloyd in Auckland to stage the show? The difference between how a small institution like Objectspace and a large one like Die Neue Sammlung worked was marked, but there was huge goodwill and that dynamic was easily sorted. Objectspace under Kim Paton’s directorship proved it has the chops to mix it with one of the world’s foremost design museums.
The exhibition includes a materials library. What do these raw components reveal about your process? Maybe a reference library is more accurate: found objects and materials I keep around me in the workshop, objects shaped accidentally and with intention that provoke in me the sense that ‘I’ve seen you before’.
I look for ways to see them again, reimagined as jewellery. The smaller gallery at Objectspace will contain some of my table works — larger than the jewellery and answering to a different function: like holding up books and holding down ideas (a bookend, a paperweight), holding flowers and holding fruit (a vase and a bowl).
You’ve exhibited widely overseas. How does showing work from Aotearoa shape the way you think about scale, audience and meaning? Not so much scale — an idea has a right size. But audience is important. To make a living as a jewellery artist I needed the bigger audience going offshore offered. You don’t need a huge audience when your production is coming from one pair of hands, but you need that audience to buy consistently. An exhibition had a longer life when it moved from country to country. That was pre-internet. Now if you show in Amsterdam, Tokyo or Melbourne, every country can see it simultaneously online. But pieces that have a particular meaning in Aotearoa don’t necessarily read the same way in Munich. You rely on the work having other qualities to attract an audience.
You’ve spoken about humour, humility and restraint in your work. How important are those qualities? I’m not sure I’d lay much claim to humility. Like most artists working in the Western art tradition, a good quota of ego fuels the engine. Restraint? In the 20th century the Western art tradition adopted the maxim ‘less is more’. I hold to that maxim, but it’s a rule to be broken when it suits. The humour, such as it exists, is about how a work can play the high/low game. For all your serious intent, you can’t stop someone looking at it and saying it looks like Donald Duck to them. I like to think when it leaves the studio I already know it looks like Donald Duck.
How does the recognition of receiving the John Britten Black Pin at the Best Awards sit alongside your practice? What is very apparent when you attend an event such as the Best Awards is what a broad field of disciplines is practiced under the umbrella description design. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, ‘I like a broad margin’. I do too. I am honoured that my jewellery making shares that margin with all those graphic, spatial, product and other designers. Good company.
Hook Hand Heart Star (29 November-8 March 2026).
objectspace.org.nz
Interview Alice Lines
Photography Sam Hartnett