Bone bead necklace

This necklace is made from oxidised silver beads and chicken bones that Warwick Freeman dug up from the compost in his backyard in Auckland. Created for the exhibition Bone Stone Shell in 1988, Bone Bead Necklace was accompanied by two other necklaces, one made of pāua (large New Zealand abalone with blue-green inner shell) beads and the other from flakes of argillite.

National identity
Bone Bead Necklace belongs to the period of the 1980s, and a decade-long search for materials and techniques of adornment that would represent an emerging Pākehā identity. Materials like shell - especially pāua - and bone took on specific values, such as naturalness, a relationship with the beach and ocean, and a sense of living in the Pacific, for makers and wearers of contemporary jewellery in New Zealand. Along with jewellers like Alan Preston and Elena Gee, Freeman was in the vanguard of this movement. His necklaces were celebrated at the time as 'some of the best work being produced in contemporary New Zealand jewellery'.

A sting in the tail
From the late 1980s, Freeman's work changes direction, and his jewellery begins to explore the ways in which national identity is constructed through shared symbols. His work starts to investigate the 'bone stone shell' movement, and the myths that underpin the jewellery of this period. Bone Bead Necklace, while definitely an expression of the time, contains the seeds of a more critical reading within it. It is made from years of roast chicken bones discarded by the artist and his family - a humble and hilarious source of material for such celebrated signs of national identity.