Coming soon: TRANSFORMA(C)TIONS: MATTER DIALOGUES

20.02.26-20.04.2026

Special opening during Inorghenta 20.02, 17:30-20:00.

Special opening during Munich Jewellery Week  06.03, 17:30-20:00.

Curators: Sofie Boons, Yitong Zhang

Facilitators: Stephen Bottomley and Melanie Kaliwoda
Participating Artists: Sofie Boons, Yitong Zhang, Stephen Bottomley, Lin Cheung, Katharina Dettar, Adi Toch, Grace Wilson, Marina Ito, Lili Barglowska, Nicholas Yiannarakis, Syd Kendall, Anastasia Kan, Emily Murphy, Lily Straker, Naima Cheniya, Natalie Asher-Martin, Rebecca Prenga, Rozana Piper, Veroni Dimitrov, Veronika Dika, Kira Fritsch, Nicole Schuster, Gabriele Hinze

Minerals, are not inert, but vital and articulate. Shaped over time by elemental forces, they embody transformation. This exhibition approaches matter not solely as geological phenomena, but as vibrant agents that can provoke, inspire, influence, transform and direct creative processes. Between light and dark, solid and liquid, stable and unstable, matter operates as a mediator, forms through which meaning, symbolic, and metaphysical metamorphoses unfold. They speak in rhythms of transformation, growth, shimmer, and resistance.

The exhibition unfolds across five cabinets on the museum’s ground floor. Each zone invites you to engage in a dialogue with matter focussing on light, form, growth, and energy, pairing mineral specimens from the collection with contemporary jewellery and metal work objects that respond, resonate, or interrupt. The show invites visitors into a multisensory dialogue between matter formations and their enacted contemporary artistic (re)interpretations.

Zone 1 ‘Energetics’
In this zone the vitality of matter is investigated through function and force. Crystals are essential to modern technologies from semiconductors to timekeeping. Quartz generates an electric charge under mechanical stress, making it a cornerstone of modern electronics. Silicon is the backbone of modern computing, its crystalline structure enabling the flow and control of electrons that power our digital world. In this zone, crystals are not passive components, but explored as active collaborators of which energetic potentials can be reinterpreted beyond utility. Artists’ works create a dialogue of how crystals shape our technological realities while inviting new narratives of energy, resonance, and transformation.

Artists: Stephen Bottomley, Lin Cheung, Katharina Dettar, Adi Toch, Grace Wilson, Marina Ito, Lili Barglowska, Nicholas Yiannarakis, Syd Kendall

Zone 2 ‘Metallurgics’
In this zone, transformation is continuous, occurring through the negotiations between rawness and refinement, solidity and fluidity, use and refusal, concealment and disclosure. These tensions emerge from both structuralist and phenomenological thought, converging into a quiet and formal reconciliation. The objects by Yitong Zhang are conceived not as metaphors for language, but as metalanguage. They explore how metal might structure its own discourses through rhythm, balance, form, and resonance. These works are neither representations nor objects for interpretation. They stand, murmur, and compose, being encountered on their own terms, allowing sensory-emotional experience to unfold in the viewers.

Zone 3 ‘Physics’
Physics is the domain of forces, growth, and emergence. In this zone, transformation is not metaphorical, it is literal, observable, and alive. Using low-temperature, low-pressure techniques, crystals grow molecule by molecule, a process Sofie Boons has adopted as an artistic method. Here crystals are co-creators, forming within metal structures. Natural facets are celebrated as unique features, while spontaneous nucleation reveals how crystals respond to, grow around, and emerge from metal forms. This is matter in motion, where physics meets aesthetics.

Zone 4 ‘Optics’
In this zone, matter reveals itself through light, its presence, absence, and persistence, emerging as a period of visibility, a flash, a shimmer, a slow afterglow.  In nature, fluorescence describes the phenomenon where certain minerals absorb ultraviolet light and immediately emit visible light, creating a vivid glow that vanishes when the light source is removed; phosphorescent crystals continue to glow even after the source fades, releasing stored energy over time. The engineered crystals created by BREVALOR extend this phenomenon, enabling makers to sculpt with light. In this showcase of the work by BAJ students, light becomes duration, and matter asserts a time-based vitality. Light reveals how matter speaks: the minerals absorb, hold, and respond, as active agents participating in perception, allowing light to become part of their life and temporal dimension.

British Academy of Jewellery Students: Anastasia Kan, Emily Murphy, Lily Straker, Naima Cheniya, Natalie Asher-Martin, Rebecca Prenga, Rozana Piper, Veroni Dimitrov, Veronika Dika

Zone 5 ‘Prophetics’
Crystals have long been regarded as oracles, objects through which futures are sensed and destinies imagined. In this zone, minerals are not passive relics but prophetic agents, their crystalline structures echoing worlds we no longer know, while projecting possibilities yet to unfold. The works of Kira Fritsch, Gabriele Hinze, and Nicole Schuster confront existential questions of human perception and permanence in an era where certainties fracture and foundations tremble. Acting as both custodians of fading knowledge and visionaries of what lies ahead, they explore matter as a conduit for foresight and transformation. Through speculative forms and material dialogues, their pieces invite us to decipher the fragile scripts of what was and the shimmering premonitions of what might emerge, united by profound parallels in content, form, and materiality.

About the Curators:

Sofie Boons is a jeweller working as Senior Lecturer in Design Crafts at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). She recently completed a four-year Crafts Council Research Fellowship at the Centre for Print Research and completed her PhD titled ‘Neo-gemstones: an Alchemical Jeweller’s exploration of lab-grown crystals’. Sofie worked as the Head of Academy for the British Academy of Jewellery. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2013 she has continually exhibited her work internationally under the moniker ‘The Alchemical Jeweller’.Yitong Zhang is a multi-award-winning practitioner and researcher in metal. Prior to pursuing her PhD at the Glasgow School of Art, Yitong graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2022 and the GSA with first-class honours in 2020, during which she also completed an academic exchange at the California College of the Arts. Yitong’s artistic practice and research have developed internationally across exhibitions, curations, lectures, and symposiums. In 2021, Yitong held a transdisciplinary exhibition in collaboration with 6 well-known Chinese poets, ‘Jewellery is a Poem’, in Beijing, which inspired her ongoing inquiry into how the forms and methodologies of poetry might inform the investigation into the poeticity of contemporary craft and metal language.