Su San Cohn
Golden memories (crushed) 
2021
Black aluminium scrap, gold jewellery (heart hanging from a boomerang pin and a wishbone brooch), rubber bands.
112mm L x 24mm W x 5mm D
 
The Compressed Brooch series started life in 1984 for another Brooch exhibition at Maker’s Mark in Melbourne. It was the first brooch I ever made. This idea sprang from using waste (using brightly coloured aluminium scrap in the workshop) and from thinking about what makes preciousness. Then it progressed as a study of personal emotional value in the black series with existing traditional jewellery. These sentiments still hold and the Compressed Brooches still hold this thinking for me. I continue to make them when people bring me their jewellery to up-cycle. 
 
Compressed Brooch is also about my commitment to serial production. It is a serially-produced bar brooch made with a simple press tool conceptually based on the scrap metal industry’s car compaction machines. Each one, although fabricated by a mass production technique, is individual. The Black series of compressed brooches (1988 –) was the first coherent resolution of the idea of ephemeral value. - Su san Cohn