This month in Kitty’s jewellery archive: forgotten kitchen utensils and pieces of aluminium. Turned into something special, naturally, by Anni Albers.
Paper clips, an aluminium sink strainer and a metal chain. Though appropriate, these are not, items on a list of hardware shop essentials. In fact, they are the materials that compose this necklace made by Anni Albers.
Albers is best known as a textile artist who redefined weaving in the 20th century. Trained at the Bauhaus, she had an instinctive approach to colour, materials and structure, later continuing her teaching and practice at Black Mountain College. Her repertoire was as eclectic as the great tapestries we know and love, spanning from handweaving on the loom, textile design, drawing, knotting and braiding, and later, studies and writings on textile structure and technique.
Colour-block patterns and clean, geometric shapes are what define Albers’ weavings. If you look closely, though, they begin to shift – tilting, bending, and loosening in their order. Her work is full of small surprises and moments where structure gives way to play.
One such small surprise, is this necklace. One of just twelve (recorded) pieces of jewellery made across her career, the piece follows the same logic that defines her textile work: a focus on how materials behave, connect, and mean something through arrangement. At its centre, the cold flat disc of a sink strainer, punctuated by little circle holes following the strainer’s circular shape. Thin silver paper clips hang from these holes, and cling to the metal plug cord. Each element seems to hang onto another, making it easy to imagine different parts moving on the body or swirling through a sink full of water.
The idea of making jewellery from hardware, for Albers, began with a discovery in Monte Albán. There, in a tomb near Oaxaca, she discovered the treasures of ancient Mexico – objects of gold and pearls, jade, rock crystal and shells. What stood out was not only their refinement, but the way value was constructed through unexpected combinations of materials. Rock crystal with gold, pearls with seashells: these pairings suggested a more flexible hierarchy than the one she recognised in contemporary jewellery.
It was there that Albers’ logic of making shifted. Back in the United States and wandering around in five-and-dime stores, the artist began looking to objects that sit outside the category of jewellery entirely: bobby pins, kitchen-sink stoppers, glass insulators, picture hooks, erasers. She described being “enchanted” by these things once they were seen outside their function.
There is something enchanting about this necklace – maybe in its charm – maybe the way it transforms everyday objects into something quite beautiful, even precious, once assembled. In doing so, it encourages a different way of seeing.
