The Invasive Species Tiara at the Victoria and Albert Museum forms part of Jan Yager’s City Flora/City Flotsam collection – jewellery that has emerged from a study of one city sidewalk in Philadelphia, PA, from 1990 to 2000.
Between 1990 and 2000, American jeweller Jan Yager created a unique body of work which used the sidewalks around her studio in Pennsylvania as a starting-point for an investigation of contemporary urban surroundings. Yager began beachcombing – collecting the detritus of the street: pen tops, paper clips, buttons, cigarette butts, spent cartridge casings, and crack vials and syringes – objects that were 'undeniably identifiable to this time and place' (Jan Yager). The City Flotsam pieces she created from them draw on the device of the 'trouvaille', or found object, which has been a key constituent of 20th-century art and craft since André Breton.
Yet these intimate objects of adornment are also 'memory devices', linking one sidewalk to a whole area, and one city to the histories that1 have shaped the contemporary landscape. Yager’s jewellery includes self-conscious historical references to the politics of trade and imperialism, the indigenous population of North America and today’s contemporary social structures. An example is the American Ruff. It is shaped like the collars of wealthy Northern European merchants in the 16th and early 17th centuries, whose ships circulated between Europe, Africa and the New World transporting goods, colonists and slaves. In contrast, the two dimes mounted on the ruff were minted in Philadelphia. Together, these historical references play against the crack vials that represent trade and mercantile activity on the streets of Philadelphia today.
Jan Yager created the City Flora series partly as an antidote to her stressful urban investigations. These metalworked floral pieces are portraits of nature’s survival in the urban environment. The Invasive Species Tiara is based on different wild flowers that grow in an abandoned lot across the road from Yager’s studio. The presence of prickly lettuce, plantain, clover, grasses and chicory in the city, growing through cracks in the concrete sidewalk or in abandoned spaces that are returning to prairie, shows the resilient strength of the natural world. At the same time, however, the urban landscape leaves its mark on these plants – and Yager represents this through the tyre-tread patterns which mark some of the leaves. She describes this as 'a kind of modern geometry'.
Jan Yager, Invasive Species Tiara