Kiepersol pendants

Kiepersol enamel and silver pendants

Etched copper and enamel set in embossed sterling silver, with cotton string.

Inspiration – Durban Art Gallery Archive show (Artspace Durban)

Marlene de Beer, For King, and Country, 2011, Two objects consisting of printed canvas over board and sterling silver medals on webbing, including embroidery cotton, stoneware slip cast cameo and pearls, Dimensions Variable

This is my interpretation of the painting (Nell Gwynn by Sir Peter Lely) for the exhibition at Artspace.

http://artworksartspace.blogspot.com/search/label/Marlene de Beer

For King and country….
In its metaphorical structure, we find a world where we encounter things not as facts to be discovered, or as screens for our mental projections, but as invitations, or even temptations, or as occasions to participate in the world’s continuous unfolding and realization (Brooke 2000: 39).

Eleanor “Nell” Gwyn (1650 –1687) is remembered for being a long-time mistress of King Charles II of England. She is regarded as being the typical rags to riches heroine such as depicted in fairy tales and popular myths; Cinderella, Pygmalion and Pretty Woman. She started her career by selling oranges to theatre audiences before becoming an actress at the age of fourteen. After having had numerous lovers she became the mistress of King Charles II whom she bore two children. As the illiterate child of an alcoholic brothel owning mother it provided her, as a woman of her time and standing, with a fairly reliable method to survival until her death from a stroke at the age of thirty seven. She is also remembered for an apparent remark made by her to her coachman while he was attempting to defend her honour; “I am a whore; find something else to fight about”.
My interpretation of the painting is in response to the subject matter and includes the metaphorical interpretation of a worldview and the cultural evolution of consciousness within a historical context. My intention is to create a dialogical interpretation of the historical roles of women. As experienced from an existential phenomenological perspective the individual finds herself temporally and spatially ‘thrown’ into a specific family, society, culture and historical epoch within which she has to ‘become herself’, as part of human possibility and existence as ‘Being-in-the-world’. Woman’s prescriptive and ‘glorified’ goal has traditionally been that of being a wife, lover and mother, as a producer, nurturer and container in sacrifice to the male and therefore also to country. Nell Gwynn was therefore presented as an offering to the male connoisseur gaze, a performance of a culturally constructed identity