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Warwick Freeman is a jewellery artist from New Zealand.
The Māori are the people who have always lived there.
The Māori call their country Aotearoa.
Warwick Freeman was born there in 1953.

The exhibition is called Hook Hand Heart Star.
It consists of 24 themes. 


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The first theme of the exhibition is called Old School.
Here you can see 5 pieces of jewellery by Warwick Freeman.
They are his early works from the years 1970 to 1980.
They show how Freeman grew as an artist at that time.

In these works, he worked with the metal of silver.
He also became more and more interested
in non-precious materials.
In this case, non-precious means:
the materials have little value.
This could be shells and stones, for example.

In these works, Freeman also explored
what materials you can use to make jewellery.
He used them early on to make his very own special jewellery

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An emblem is a symbol that is easy to recognise.
For Warwick Freeman, emblems are
symbols and shapes that everyone knows.
Like a heart or a star, for example.
He uses them a lot in his work.

Around the year 1985,
Freeman created a series of brooches.
The series is called: Fern Fish Feather Rose.
These brooches were his most important
pieces of jewellery for a while.

In a new series of jewellery, Freeman uses
the symbols of heart and star again.
The exhibition is named after this series:
Hook Hand Heart Star.

For the artist, the combination of the symbols
has its own meaning.
But it can mean something completely different
to the visitors.

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Pākehā is a word from the Māori language.
The Māori are the people
who have always lived in New Zealand.
Later, people from Europe immigrated.
The Māori call these Europeans and their children Pākehā.

Some of the works here look like
mourning jewellery or service medals from Europe.
Service medals are awards for special achievements.
Other pieces of jewellery refer to
the difficult history of immigration from Europe.

The smallest of these pieces is called White Butterfly.
It is a butterfly that damages crops.
The Europeans brought this butterfly to Aoteaora
when they immigrated.
Aoteaora is the Māori name for New Zealand.

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Warwick Freeman’s jewellery is often inspired
by the shapes and patterns in nature.

For example, he used scallop shells
to create a brooch that is shaped like a flower.
This brooch is called Scallop Blossom.

The artist looks for shapes in nature
that he only has to change a little bit for his jewellery.

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Freeman often gets ideas for his work
from objects that he randomly finds.
Such found objects are, for example:

• a flattened matchbox
• the top from a tissue box made of cardboard
• the ring from a bottle of soda
• the handle of a screwdriver

The artist sees many possibilities in these objects.
This is important to him in his jewellery:
You should be able to see the original use of the objects.
But he also wants people to see
something completely different.

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Warwick Freeman created the jewellery in this theme
between 1980 and 1990.
The artist was inspired by old jewellery ornaments
from Moana Oceania.
Ornaments are decorations.
They are added to the shapes as additional decorations.
Moana Oceania is a word from the Māori language.
It means: world of islands in the southern Pacific.
The Pacific is the large ocean between America and Asia.
New Zealand is also in this area.

Back then, you could see the old jewellery only
in the museums of New Zealand.
The pieces of Māori jewellery are often made
of shells or stones.
They only have a little hole or edge drilled into them.
This impressed Warwick Freeman a lot.

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In this theme, there are some examples
of Warwick Freeman’s bird jewellery.
They clearly show how the artist works:
He does not create an exact copy of an object.
He simplifies the shape of the object.
And yet you can see what object he refers to.

Freeman got his idea for
a series of bird pendants from photos.
The pendants are made from white Corian.
Corian is a mix of natural and artificial materials.
It is hard as rock, but also easy to work with.

In the photos, you can see gannets.
These birds are flying at Muriwai Beach
on the West Coast of Auckland, New Zealand.
They are the same size as geese.

The pair of brooches called
Red Bird Black Bird shows:
Freeman simplifies the shapes a lot.
The model for these brooches is a scissor-cut illustration.
It only shows the birds’ outlines.

Even a shelf inspired Freeman to create a pendant.
The shelf’s fixing looks like a bracket.
With this bracket, you can fix a shelf board.
The piece of jewellery is called Bracket Bird.

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Warwick Freeman is always happy when
he finds objects that look like faces.
Some examples for these objects are:

• holes in a stone formed by the water
• stones that he finds on the beach
• the root of a horse’s tooth

One of Warwick Freeman’s friends
is the jewellery artist Otto Künzli.
He sometimes sends Freeman pictures
of faces that he finds in nature.

Freeman even saw a face in a piece of an exhaust pipe.
He found the exhaust pipe on the streets in Munich and
he copied it.
He then made a large brooch of it
that is exactly the same size as the exhaust pipe.
The brooch is called Mask.

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Warwick Freeman uses the image of a heart a lot.
He often spots heart shapes in nature,
like in the leaves of the Kawakawa plant.
You can find this plant on the islands in
the South of New Zealand.
Warwick Freeman used the leaves as a model for
a brooch made from greenstone.
Greenstone is a green volcanic stone.
The brooch is called Kawakawa Leaf.

A shallop shell can also be heart shaped.

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Warwick Freeman experimented
with different shapes of stars.
In these experiments, he developed the shape of a pillow.
This is how he created the Flower Star brooches.

If you place these brooches tip-to-tip,
the space in between looks like a pillow:
it is a rectangle with edges that are curved inwards.

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Since around 1988, Warwick Freeman experiments
with the shape of stars.
The star with 4 points is his personal sign.

Stars are everywhere.
For the artist, they have a special power as symbols.
The same goes for the hook, the heart and the circle.
You can find these 4 shapes a lot
in Warwick Freeman’s jewellery.

For a project, he collected shapes of stars with 4 points
that you can find in nature and
that you can see in objects.
The project is called: I collect stars.
With this collection, he developed new pieces of jewellery

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For 5,000 years, people have engraved
names and short forms of names on jewellery.
This work by Warwick Freeman refers to this:
Alphabet Rings.

But this work is also linked to a little story from 1953.
Someone asked the famous Spanish painter Pablo Picasso
to say something about his art.
But he just drew an alphabet on a piece of paper.
He said: Anyone who sees that
can make their own words from the letters.
That is why Warwick Freeman
made a necklace of 26 rings.
Each ring has a letter on it.

Another work from the Ring series is called Gaze.
It is a ring made of silver
that was turned black artificially.
On the ring, there is a precious stone called carnelian.
The silver’s shadow shimmers through the carnelian.
It looks like a pupil.
The pupil is the black circle in our eyes.

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The circle is one of the most important shapes
for Warwick Freeman.
The circular shape is important for jewellery
that goes around the wrist, the neck or the finger.
But the circle is also a very old symbol for
the sun, the moon and the pupil of the eye.

In a special series of necklaces,
Freeman uses the circle together with shells and stones.
It includes a necklace called Big Circle.
For this necklace, he cut out
the largest possible discs from pearl oysters.
These pearl oysters only exist in the Pacific.
The Pacific is the large ocean between America and Asia.
In their shells, the oysters form
very thick layers of mother-of-pearl.

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Warwick Freeman is a Pākehā.
Pākehā is a word from the Māori language.
The Māori are the people
who have always lived in New Zealand.
Later, people from Europe immigrated.
The Māori call these Europeans and their children Pākehā.

With his jewellery, Warwick Freeman looks at the shapes
that New Zealand’s cultures have in common:
the culture of the Māori, the culture of the Pākehā and
the culture of other ethnic groups in Polynesia.
Polynesia is a group of islands in the southern Pacific.
New Zealand is part of it.
The Pacific is the large ocean between America and Asia.

Freeman wants to find out:
Which shapes exist in all 3 cultures?
What did the immigrants copy from the Māori
without their permission?
This is called cultural appropriation.

In this theme, Freeman shows how
the jewellery production methods of the 3 cultures mix.
For the European method,
people often set precious stones in gold.
Freeman did this for his piece of jewellery
called Māori Tiki.
Tiki is a necklace with a special idea behind.

This is typical of jewellery from New Zealand:
It combines the culture of the Māori,
the culture of the Pākehā and the other cultures of Polynesia.
And that is why the tiki shape and the koru shape
have a special meaning for people in New Zealand today.
The koru shape looks like a rolled-up fern leaf.

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Warwick Freeman’s work includes several wall installations.
An installation is an art project used to design a room.

In this theme, there are examples of:
• red pieces of jewellery
• black pieces of jewellery
• a group of very large pendants
• a collection of shell leftovers that Freeman cut off
when he made other pieces of jewellery

Warwick Freeman also works with
leftovers from materials that piled up in his workshop.
He used these leftovers to create
the wall installation Dust.

For the installation, he arranged small tiles in a grid.
He painted these tiles with colourful dust.
The dust comes from various materials
that he used in his work before.

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In this theme, you can see different pieces of jewellery 
that are shaped like hands:
• a hand that greets
• two hands that offer something
• a hand that helps
• a hand that looks like a wing
• a hand that transforms into a bird

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Warwick Freeman uses materials from
different landscapes in New Zealand.
They are typical of this island.
You can see this, for example, in the rings called
North Cape to Bluff.
These places are at the northern tip and
at the southern tip of New Zealand.

Warwick Freeman has travelled from one place to the other.
From each stop of his journey,
he brought a special stone.
With these stones, he made 16 rings.

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In this theme, you can see jewellery
that is very unusual for Warwick Freeman.
For this work, a beautiful shape
matters more to him than how well you can wear it.

Here are 2 examples: a bracelet and cufflinks.
The bracelet looks like a fishing reel with line and hook.
The cufflinks are particularly large.
They look like fancy fashion jewellery
from the years between 1960 and 1970.

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This theme consists of 6 different hooks and
is called Story of the Hook.
Warwick Freeman created these pieces of jewellery
between 1990 and 2010.
He used different materials to copy found objects:
• a crane hook that looks like the letter S
• a clothes hanger hook
• the plastic hook from a shower curtain
• a coat hook

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Warwick Freeman keeps thinking about these questions:
What is the relationship between the things in nature?
What do we as humans do with these things?

One example for this work
is a brooch called Old Brain. 

It looks like a brain.

The artist wants to show:
People have a good understanding of nature and
of the materials.
We use patterns, colours and shapes that we see in nature.
Even many corals are shaped like a brain.

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Beads are made from different materials.
They have always been important pieces of jewellery
on necklaces and strings.
Bead necklaces are often made with great effort and
in a special way.
Therefore, they are typical of the person who makes them.

This is also true for Freeman’s piece of jewellery
called Southern Cross.
The Southern Cross is a group of stars.
You can see it particularly well from
the southern part of the Earth.

Stars with 4 points are engraved
in this brooch and this bracelet.
The stars form a diamond shape.
For these pieces of jewellery,
Freeman threaded small silver beads and
connected them to the stars.

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A myth is an old story that explains
the origins of the world, for example.
Warwick Freeman has used such stories for a long time.
He also uses the faith in God or another higher power.
With his jewellery, he wants to express
what people believe in.

The jewellery in this theme refers to these beliefs:

• The story of the demi-god Māui.
People believe that he pulled up
the North Island of New Zealand from the sea.
• The story of Adam and Eve in Paradise.
• The Greek myth of Icarus.
Icarus could fly with wings made of wax and feathers.
But he crashed because he flew too close to the sun.
The sun’s heat melted the wax.
• An old Buddhist story. 

In this story, a monkey wants to capture
the moon’s reflection in a puddle.
Buddhism is a major world religion,
mainly in East Asia and South Asia.

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Warwick Freeman often uses patterns in his work.
He is interested in different shapes and
where they come from.
This can be shapes in nature or shapes created by humans.
Like shapes that are scribbled or carved, for example.

Freeman arranged pebbles in a special way
to create a pattern.
He used this pattern for his brooch called Pebble.

Another brooch is called Lattice.
In this brooch, you can see the weaving pattern of a basket.
These baskets are very important in New Zealand.

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In this case, Sentence refers to
a smart saying or a piece of wisdom.
With his jewellery, Warwick Freeman often
wants to share a piece of wisdom.

In his Sentences, he arranges the jewellery in a special way.
With his arrangements, Freeman wants to share
his feelings about what he sees or hears.
Or he arranges the jewellery
depending on the material he used.

A line of different brooches is called Sentences.
But the artist does not specify
the meaning of these lines.
Viewers can decide what is important to them.
If they want, they can pick only some shapes
that have a special meaning for them.
What the viewers see also depends on
their knowledge about the shape’s meanings.