8 June until 20 August 2025
Julia Walter - Mother Earth
jewellery
MOTHER EARTH
For a new work cycle I use earth as a sculpting material, literally from the ground of my mother's garden.
The earth is filtered and processed by hand into clay. I use this material to make wearable sculptures, which are fired in a clay oven. After firing, the sculptures range in color from light orange to dark brown, some are darkened afterwards with carbon black.
I propose that the connection between wearing, symbol, social status and magic properties of jewellery still work similar today as it did 40 millennia ago. I am inspired by iconography which all humans can read: animals, seashells, bones, plants, the human body. Are there universally intelligible symbols and archetypes, which within themselves, hold an inherent power? In their simplicity, my symbols, and the implication that they will be worn by someone, reveal an essence of humanness, at the same time leave space for new interpretations.
I present a first selection of pendants of this new Mother Earth cycle in this exhibition.
Material Info:
Earth:
Planting a tree in my mother's garden, I observed the dense, plastic quality of the soil. Pelosol Brown Earth is the type of earth generally found in the region of Stuttgart and the Filder Plateau, where my family lives in Baden-Württemberg in Germany. Pelosols cover clay- and marlstones of the Mesozoic era of the landscapes of southern Germany. It is a fertile ground and its color varies from grey to brown to red, depending on the source rock. The name is derived from the Greek (pelos = soft clay, mud) and the Latin (solum = soil) and expresses the high clay content of this soil.
Fossils:
While digging a garden pond, I found the fossils used in some of my work. My father’s family is located on the richest fossil sites of Baden-Württemberg, Trossingen. It is also the largest site in the world, where dinosaurs from the Triassic period have been found. The belemnites, in the vernacular are named thunderbolt or devils fingers - actually they are fragments of the tentacles of a pre-squid, which lived in a sea millions of years ago and can be found today in the marine sedimentation of the Swabian Jurassic of the Swabian Alps.
