Street Sweepers: A Jewellery Exploration

Street Sweepers is a collaborative jewellery project between Melbourne’s street sweeping fraternity and jeweller Anke Kindle.
This project is inspired by the street sweeping machines, the knowledge and stories the machine operators bring to the equation as well as the machines industrial and mechanical beauty.

The intention of this project is to make the invisible labour tangible through jewellery objects and to bring it within an intimate range that allows for thought and contemplation on the activity of street sweeping.

Environmental Protection Agencies throughout the world have long identified street sweeping as a most beneficial task in reducing harmful micro particles and waste yet often this task goes unacknowledged and unseen. Undertaken in the small hours of the day we lack evidence of the work conducted as well as street sweeping being an overall reductive task that does away with debris and dirt.

In the Street sweeper project the artist wishes to bring this process and its intricacies of street sweeping to an intimate, personal vantage point - one that enables the viewer to take an intimate and contemplative look at this labour as one of wonder and awe.

Throughout the project an extensive library of photographs was developed and used to document the processes of sweeping - honing in on rotational movement, colour and industrial componentry. This imagery together with the operators personal accounts of the machinery was used to visually interpret the machines intricacies: slotting mechanisms, sliding grooves and container forms are translated into the design work- elevated in order to create an aesthetic enabling contemplation of the process.

The street sweeper project and its accompanying jewellery work is therefore an attempt to reframe the labour of sweeping into an act of care- an act of care through small, deliberate and aesthetically beautiful gestures. This care functions in the form of jewellery on a micro level yet goes further beyond the personal to a macro level as an act of care for the planet we collectively inhabit as humans.

Anke Kindle is the founder and director of STUDIO BLAU.- a jewellery and object design workshop situated in the inner North of Melbourne. STUDIO BLAU uses the ancient craft tradition of brush binding to produce wearable objects that explore the value of work and the politics of inanimate objects especially relating to the feminine and personal domestic realm. The objects produced by STUDIO BLAU. are both contemplative and curiously striking at the same time and always beckon the question what is it that we see and what is the meaning of these inanimate entities.

The exhibition is a part of Conscious Craft – a Craft Victoria initiative showcasing innovative creations by makers and designers who are actively considering sustainability and ethics in their production methods and use of materials.