Mark Vaarwerk was born in Sydney in 1973. He studied jewellery at the Sydney Institute of Technology’s Design Centre, Enmore, graduating with an Associate Diploma in Arts (Jewellery Design) in 1997. Shortly after this he established a jewellery practice in Brisbane, making jewellery to sell and exhibit in Australia and sometimes internationally. In 2010 he returned to Sydney, where he currently resides.
Mark Vaarwerk is known for his skills in transforming throwaway plastics into beautiful pieces of colourful contemporary jewellery, which began with turning plastic shopping bag into string useful for making necklaces with an adaptation of traditional hand-spindle-spinning techniques. This fascination broadened and evolved to include bottles, such as juice, milk or shampoo bottles, fused around silver to make rings and bracelets.
Slowly these materials, especially plastic bags, became harder to collect in useful quantities and attractive colours because of a growing awareness of the impact they can have once disposed of in such large quantities. As a result Mark searched for new sources of plastic – and expanded polystyrene (being freely and easily available espically as food boxes) became adopted as the main ingredient in his most recent works. To this material is added a variety of other plastics such as broken appliance casings, broken car headlight, brake-light and indicator covers, picked up off the street, and even used cigarette filters, which when processed and used as a coating, can add colour to the otherwise typically white expanded polystyrene. Continuing to manipulate these benign, discarded materials with experimental techniques, the result is often intriguing, sometimes vaguely reminiscent of the original material, always surprising.
Why were you drawn to participate in
Once More, With Love?
mainly i was drawn to the project in
the hope that there would be some interesting materials in the
mystery bag - a chance for me to experiment with new materials, to
possibly find new sources of otherwise familiar materials, and
encouragement to find different ways of utilising traditional
jewellery ingredients such as precious metals and stones.
What was the most
interesting/weirdest thing in your mystery bag?
i think the most interesting
things i received were super sized clip on earrings. they look like a
moon scape lavaland in multicoloured resin. amazingly there are two
pairs, with slightly different colour combinations! So weird that i
couldn't touch them...