A boot is a boot.......is a boot a boot?

Biennaleprisen for kunsthåndværk og design 2004

Vinderbegrundelse:
Mette Saabye vandt med smykkeserien En båd er en båd ... er en båd en båd? 24 smykker udført i aluminium, foto, birkefinér, træ, silke, plast, glas, papir, sværte og strandsten. Priskomiteens begrundelse:
Wearable Memories
Mette Saabye’s series ”A Boat is a Boat...Is a Boat a Boat?

Mette Saabye (b. 1969) trained as a goldsmith. Her tools are the saw, the flexshaft and the pliers. She knows her material and has full control of the design process - but nevertheless, she chooses the unpredictable.
In the current work, 23 pieces of jewellery represent the identity of 23 different people. Each person has been decisive for the design of one piece. Asked to describe in writing a personal association, memory or experience with a boat, and also to document the type of boat in sketches or pictures, the respondents have conveyed Saabye with material of a deeply personal content. Based on this material she has produced a piece of jewellery for each person. The result is the representation of 23 different conceptions of the same physical thing; a boat. As the title suggests, a boat is a boat; a specific type of object in the world of physical things. But as it is added, the boat is never the same. Memories, associations, longings and personal interpretations create an almost nostalgic atmosphere that suddenly invests the anonymous designation ‘boat’ with a striking authenticity.
The concern of Saabye is to point at this common human condition of navigating between anonymous diversity and individually experienced authenticity. She points to the fact that the world is perceived according to the personal and social history of each individual, although we agree on the same linguistic constructions. Language potentially contains a personal level of profundity.
In this project everybody can be a co-creator. The artistic process can no longer be ascribed solely to the artist, but is created in the interplay between the frame set up by the artist and the social body.
Thus, Saabye represents a conceptual practice that employs the aesthetic expression only as a point of departure for a more reflective and social agenda. This practice refers rather to contemporary visual art strategies than to traditional Danish crafts, whose social agenda has been determined by the wish to provide people with aesthetic objects. Material culture, the relation between people and things, authenticity and the anchoring in physical objects are at focus. In this way, Saabye never looses neither aesthetic sensibility nor the social object of sight. She represents a practice in change that, by being reflective, aesthetic and object-based, has all the power to claim attention.

Louise Mazanti, Ph.D.

This text was originally published in Languages - papers and exhibition 2005, (edt. Jorunn veiteberg and Louise Mazanti), Think Tank - A European Iniciative for the Applied Arts, edition 02, 2005.