Day 2 of 9
Naarm / Melbourne Contemporary Jewellery and Object Biennial
24 October — 1 November 2026
SCAN is a durational contemporary jewellery project presented across the nine days of Radiant Pavilion, 24 October to 1 November 2026. Each day, a new micromosaic jewellery object will be released, forming a cumulative series that unfolds with the biennial.
Drawing on the historic micromosaic tradition of 18th and 19th century Italy, where finely cut glass tesserae depicted ruins, flora, and devotional imagery as wearable souvenirs. This jewellery object project deliberately disrupts the genre’s symbolism and technical perfection. Historic micromosaics functioned as portable memory objects, preserving romanticised images of sites of Rome for Grand Tour travellers. In contrast, SCAN proposes the contemporary souvenir as unstable, fragmented, and incomplete.
Each piece intentionally uses QRs and barcodes, leaving voids where tesserae are absent. Substrate and adhesive remain visible, compositions are interrupted, and imagery dissolves into gaps. QR codes rendered in glass tesserae, incomplete, unscannable, transforming today’s digital iconography into a new form of ruin. Where historic mosaics monumentalised stone architecture, these works monumentalise data, questioning what we now what data we choose to access, share and preserve.
The project stages a tension between slow craft and fast digital circulation. The labour-intensive technique of micromosaic contrasts with the rapid daily release of data, and images, echoing the pace of online consumption. Over nine days, the collection accumulates like a fractured archive.
SCAN reframes micromosaic not as a nostalgic revival, but as a critical material language through which absence, erasure, labour, and digital dependency can be examined, positioning contemporary jewellery as both object and unstable repository of data memory.
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