The five pieces in Old School chronicle several developments in Warwick Freeman’s early practice in the 1970s and 80s: his experiments in working silver, his growing interest in non-precious materials, his exploration of the conceptual potential of jewellery and his movement towards a language of forms.

Freeman’s interest in recognisable signs and symbols like a heart or star culminated in the mid-1980s in his first poetic sequence of four brooches, Fern Fish Feather Rose, and continues in the present day with his most recent four-piece arrangement, Hook Hand Heart Star. Although the combinations of emblems have particular meanings for Freeman, the universality of their symbolic language and form encourages viewers to read the groups in a way that is meaningful to them.

Pākehā is a Māori word than means a New Zealander of European descent. Several of these pieces demonstrate Freeman’s adoption of European jewellery making traditions such as mourning jewellery and service medals. These are included alongside works that reflect on the complexity of Pākehā identity by referencing the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand. White Butterfly, the smallest piece in this group demonstrates this as an emblem of a pest introduced to the country by European settlers.

The diverse representations of flora displayed here are part of the game Warwick Freeman plays with the materials he has gathered in the studio, looking for the patterns and form they may offer him. The hinges on the shells in his Scallop Blossom brooch quickly generated the flower shape. Freeman looks for natural features that allow for the minimal engineering that he tries to achieve on any piece.

These broThese works all from the 1980s were inspired by traditional adornment pieces from Moana Oceania held in museum collections from throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. For many Pākehā jewellers during this period visiting museum collections was their only experience of adornment from the pacific. Freeman was influenced by the minor interventions used by makers, as simple as drilling a hole or notching an edge to turn a shell or a stone into a piece of jewellery.

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The selection of birds displayed here demonstrate Freeman’s method of stylising, refining, and reducing form. Photographs of gannets in flight taken at Muriwai Beach on Auckland’s West Coast inspired a flock of bird pendants in white corian. A scissor-cut illustration exercise generated the templates for the Red Bird Black Bird duo of brooches, and a bracket from a shelving system was the source for the unusual forms of Freeman’s Bracket Bird pendants.

Warwick Freeman has been finding faces in the world around him over many decades. He enjoys discovering faces in unusual objects, like the holes worn through stones collected on the beach, or a face found in the root system of a horse’s tooth. His Munich jewellery colleague and friend Otto Künzli has played along too, posting Freeman faces he has found The large Mask is a replica of a piece of car exhaust Künzli found on the street in Munich. Freeman’s copy remains faithful to the scale of the original object.


The heart is one of Freeman’s most recognisable emblems. He makes hearts that reflects his context as an artist working in Aotearoa New Zealand. A heart-shaped greenstone Kawakawa Leaf brooch copies the naturally occuring heart form of the native kawakawa plant, and one can be found in the curved section of a scallop shell.

The pillow form emerged from Freeman’s pattern making experiments with stars. If you set out to make a repeat pattern by placing a number of his Flower Star brooches tip-to-tip, you will discover that the negative space between the two pieces is a pillow shape – a rectangle with concave edges.

Freeman has experimented with making stars since the late 1980s. The four pointed star has become his personal sign, you bear the shape of it on your body – purse together your thumbs and index fingers and hold them up to the light. Stars are everywhere, and along with the hook, heart, and circle they form some of Freeman’s most enduring emblematic works. Freeman has continued to develop a project called ‘I collect stars’, where he finds readymade four-pointed star shapes, in the natural and manmade environment, some of which become ideas for a new piece of jewellery.

Warwick Freeman refers to the five-millennia-long history of embossing signatures onto jewellery in his Alphabet Rings. The work is also his reaction to an anecdote from 1953 when Pablo Picasso was asked for an artist statement. Picasso drew an alphabet on a piece of paper and said that the writer could do whatever he liked with it. Freeman thought this was the perfect statement. Another ring in this group is the mesmerising Gaze where the pupil of the eye is formed by the shadow of the oxidised silver band showing through the carnelian disc.

The circle is described by Freeman as one of the big themes in his practice. From a jewellery perspective, the circle is the measure of the wrist, the neck, and the finger, but as an archetype it is also the sun, the moon, the pupil of the eye. This imposing group of necklaces shows Freeman’s work with the circle in shell and stone. His Big Circles necklace pushed the size of a flat disc that could be cut from a pearl shell to its absolute maximum.

As a Pākehā jeweller in Aotearoa New Zealand Warwick Freeman has investigated the commonalities of visual language across cultures. A number of his works test the line between appropriation and intentional ambiguity. The works in this group attempt to reference the intersection of Māori and Pākehā lineages of making. Tiki Face takes the Māori tiki and sets it in gold claws from the European tradition of jewellery making. The complexities of this process are particular to Aotearoa and highlight the currency and cultural politics of particular shapes like the tiki and the koru.

Wall mounted installations feature in Warwick Freeman’s practice. The four examples here range from a colour-themed arrangement of jewellery in red and black; a group of four over-sized pendants; an abstract assembly of the shell offcuts from another body of work. The gridded tiles of Dust chart the residue of making and the by-products of materials that accummulate in the studio – they are painted with the coloured dust of almost every material Freeman has worked with over the course of his career.

An open hand offering a greeting, two hands that serve, a hand that helps, a hand that is also a wing, and a hand that is transforming into a bird.

Warwick Freeman’s direct material relationship with the distinctive geological features of Aotearoa is evident in his suite of 16 rings, North Cape to Bluff, which is a record of a journey he made from the top of Aotearoa to the bottom, souveniring a stone from various locations along the way and creating a signature of each place.

Several of the bracelets in this group are rare examples in Warwick Freeman’s career where the gesture of the form wins out over the practicality of the object as a wearable piece. There is a bangle that has a fishing reel with line and hook, as a template, and chunky cuffs that attempted to recapture the flamboyancy of adornment in 1960’s fashion jewellery.

Story of the Hook is an group of six different hooks made by Warwick Freeman over two decades using a found object as a template and remaking it in a different material. The group includes Freeman’s copies of the s-shaped hook used by crane operators to catch and release cargo, a coat hanger hook, a plastic shower curtain hook, and a replica of a hook used to fasten an apron.

A consistent theme in Freeman’s work is the relationship between what can be found naturally occuring in the world around us and our human interaction with it. Old Brain refers to the primal sense of nature, knowledge and materials. For Freeman this can be understood as the way we intuit pattern, colour or form from its original source. His Old Brain brooch illustrates the recognisable form of the brain that also repeats elsewhere in the natural world, such as in textured patterns of coral.

Strings of beads have a large presence in the history of jewellery, and the repetitive and laboured work of making beads shares a relationship with mark making. Freeman’s Southern Cross brooch and bracelet see incised four-pointed stars composed in a diamond arrangement and threaded with a strand of silver beads, which are utilised to give the works their composition. The Southern Cross is a constellation of stars that form a cross shape and is mainly visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

Over many years Freeman has drawn on myth and spirituality as a means of storytelling that reflects something about ourselves and how we live. Among the jewellery in this group are works that respond to the story of the demi-god Māui fishing up Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand; the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; the Greek myth of Icarus flying too close to the sun, and the Buddhist fable about a monkey that tries and fails to capture the reflection of the moon in a pool of water.

Freeman uses pattern regularly in his work, exploring a variety of ways patterns can be generated: from those found occurring in nature through to random doodling that involves different mark making actions like scratching or carving. In the case of Pebble brooch he creates a pattern from a cluster of found pebbles. The Lattice brooch investigates the grid, which also has a particular reference in Aotearoa as the weave of a basket.

Freeman draws jewellery together into sentences, finding a rhythm within a group of jewellery that is never literal. The arrangement could be motivated by a visual or verbal sensibility, or by material considerations. Presented in lines of brooches of various lengths the Sentences are intended to be read by the viewer, and Freeman has over many years committed to the process of the audience reading his sentences as they will. They may skip over some forms and pick up on the ones that have meaning to them depending on their own knowledge and references they bring to the emblematic forms.