Resident from September 1, until December 1, 2025.
The New-Zeeland artist Moniek Schrijer is internationally known for her innovative approach to contemporary jewellery art. She transforms new, second-hand, recycled and found materials into intriguing jewellery and objects that balance between jewel, sculpture and wall object. With a sharp eye for form, texture and light, she creates works that fade the boundaries between dimensions and that invite the viewer to reconsider the relationship between object, body and observation.
Moniek pulls inspiration from both her physical and digital living environment and explores the duality between jewel and object and object and wearer. She makes use of various techniques, including from traditional goldsmithing to printing techniques, photography and painting. With projects like A Hologram of a Diamond she received international acknowledgement, including the prestigious Herbert Hofmann Preis (2016).
The residency at DIVA gives her the opportunity to broaden her research in dialogue with the collection and the library of the museum. She wants to focus on the rich tradition of regional jewellery, especially the Dutch ear clip and other forms of European body accessorising. She wants to connect these with patterns and forms of her birth country Aotearoa (New-Zeeland). This way, a new corpus of work establishes, where European ornaments meet New-Zeeland's flora and fauna.
During her stay, Moniek wants to experiment with techniques such as printing, smithing and shaping of silver wire and plate to create the sculptural and dimensional jewellery. She combines this with her own stone-setting techniques and pulls inspiration from the patterns, engravings and chains from the Lunden collection. This results in wearable art pieces, from head- and neckpieces to brooches, where historical techniques and contemporary aesthetics come together.
For Moniek, the residency at DIVA is more than just a chance to establish new techniques: it is a possibility to make cultural contamination more visible. Her work during the residency will celebrate the hybrid and layered character of heritage and show how the past and the future come together in contemporary jewellery.
