Jamila Wallentin, a multidisciplinary artist, presents jewelry pieces that bear witness to a time when bodies—employing ancestral techniques of weaving, rope-making, and basketry—now lend themselves to a poetic act of remembrance. Her early training in textile and environmental design plays a central role in the works on display at the Hectare Gallery. Like a living material in transformation, suddenly revealing the layers of an entire life, or like a parasite accompanying the elegant pleats of a fabric, her brooches, rings, and earrings stimulate the twists and turns of our imaginations.
The creative process is also central to her work. The artist herself crafted the machine needed to automatically wind threads of different colors and textures, before carving her spools to present them to the viewer. For her metal pieces, Jamilla Wallentin “works with metal by applying technical processes of pleating and assembly typical of textiles.”
Studies in archaeology and art history, along with training in Art—Object and Contemporary Jewelry at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, as well as two years of travel, complement her initial training in textile and environmental design. As an author and exhibition curator—including at Brussels Jewellery Week with the ViV Collective—Jamilla Wallentin has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Her work was notably featured at Hectare in 2020 during the Brio exhibition alongside Cannelle Preira and Marine Chevanse.
View of the exhibition:
