Tantric Object

This necklace is made from the bottoms of old Swiss glass poison bottles, shaped like skulls, which have been cut and decorated with gold lacquer. The end plate, with the molded word "GIFT", has a double meaning: gift in English means a present, in German it means poison. Bernhard Schobinger uses materials that have nothing to do with traditional jewelry, such as shards of glass and pottery, colored pencils, spent underwear elastic, worn eraser nubs, nails, piano keys, and screws. Often combining these seemingly worthless bits and pieces with precious metals and stones, Schobinger denies his jewelry its function as a status symbol and uses it as a vehicle for social expression instead. Necklaces made from skulls, Schobinger says, are symbols in Tantric Buddhism of emptiness, of the illusion of reality, and this necklace is a contemporary expression of that emptiness. For him, it is the symbolic quality of a material, rather than its intrinsic value, that makes it worthy of being transformed into an object. Made of precious scavenged materials, his sometimes unwearable objects challenge our conventional understanding of the purposes of jewelry and adornment.