Cluster Residency Programme and “Committee of Sleep” Exhibition by Claudia Lepik

In the Summer 2021 K2 Academy had a pleasure to partner with Cluster London for a jewellery residency programme during which Claudia Lepik, a jeweller from Estonia, prepared a series of pieces for a solo exhibition at the Oxo Tower in October 2021.

Jewellery Residency

Launched this year, the Cluster Residency Programme is proud to support four artists working in illustration, ceramics, jewellery and photography, granting each a solo exhibition and a customised package of support. For our first jeweller in residence, we partnered Claudia Lepik with the K2 Academy of Contemporary Jewellery, for a programme of personal tutoring and have worked to establish a succession of upcoming exhibition opportunities with the Romanian Jewellery Week, RUUP & Form Gallery and Precious Collective Online Jewellery Week. Additionally, a byproduct of Lepik’s residency overlapping with photographer Lucy Shortman’s residency, has been the collaboration on an upcoming photo book that will be released later this year.

"Committee of Sleep" Exhibition by Claudia Lepik

“We dream to remember, We dream to forget, We dream to rehearse.”

Wearing elegant suits and minimal dresses as canvases for their elaborate accessories, the Committee of Sleep kidnap without violence or any denotable rational. Silently at night they load their wards onto a submarine, where within a laboratory they strip them first of their clothes and second of their appearances. Last to go are their memories.

Every piece by Estonian jewellery Claudia Lepik evokes a world beyond it, each is an act of theatricality and architecture from which extends an unravelling network of cultural histories. Frequently pushing at the edges of what is acceptable or deemed practical, Lepik’s jewellery breaches the scales of sculpture, turning the faces upon which they rest or hang into kinetic motors that propel a chain of motion. Whether worn or resting, her work encourages us to wonder what ritual lies behind it, what motive or symbolic value informed its creation, what codes of conduct it compelled. In this way, her practice immediately reminds us of the religious or occult, the repetition of form installing a concealed value into her chosen lexicon of design.

And yet, contrasting with histories of impossibly large jewellery that augments the female form, Lepik’s work is not invasive, not impractical, not the preserve of a religious figure or model on the catwalk. It is by its design entirely wearable, through careful calibration made to non-invasively balance or rest upon the wearer.

In its own unique manner, it signals a return to more dramatic forms of facial jewellery, ones which evoke the allure of the mask and generate mystique. Permitting the theatricality of dreams to surface into the everyday.