I look to my hands to move. I move them in emotional gestures, ridiculous circles as though childhood returns to my body and I cannot escape it. I attest, I try and find this sandbox in my mind, my rage, my love, my insecurity, and my ego. I kick and I scream. I cannot help it, I cannot try to help it. I try to help it. And again I draw, hoping that the shapes and sense come to me, and leave me for space to say to them something.
The marriage of a poem and a page can only happen if we are to admit their existence, and in doing so, expound upon them further. In attempting to reject something, you must accept it. Does jewelry have the ability to speak of ideas larger than itself, create space for not just supplemental beauty, but deep reflection? Looking at a necklace I made my mother when I was 4, I see a memory. I feel myself somehow in it. Is it me who made it, or was it me? The wooden beads on this necklace are nothing special, macaroni strung up on polyester cord. This necklace is a bridge between now and then, my mother and I. Jewelry acts in this way naturally. The notion of private and public has never left Peter's’ work, but to preserve it, he must escape over and over again.
In Peters’ latest works, MA, there seems to be a quality of reflection unlike other bodies of work. A reflective pool, a space, a dimension – something you see but cannot reach by going. It is quite revelatory work. This work is devoid of the hand, and evades the term jewelry from first glance like many of Ruudt Peters’ works. Mirror layered with black marks, pools built with swirling dimension. Then another piece, a depth built like looking into a crystal. A ring looking carved from fine smoky quartz is actually built through layers of Man-Made material. The mirror can be deep or shallow in these newer works. Breaking from recent images of the body, the face or any figurative notions, this work is incorporeal and pensive.
What does it mean to make stones with the most contemporary plastics, materials seemingly divorced from the notions of the spirit. Toxic, scientific materials used to create spiritual pools, mirrors and spaces emerging and descending into stone like, primordial pieces. ‘Against tradition, but with a kiss’ is how I characterize the works that are before us now. And more importantly. These works offer another type of mirror, one which directs the gaze upon previous bodies of work to see this romantic gesture.
Aaron Decker