The Ogs 2024 Photo: Jane Dodd
Jane Dodd in the Animal Attic Photo: Tūhura Otago Museum
White footed ants made from freshwater pearls, a scorpion’s sting carved out of ebony, and an orangutan and a gibbon in yew wood and hollywood, respectively. What about a giant petrel beak in basswood? Or a pūpū rangi (kauri snail) made out of kauri gum and silver?
These are but a handful of the 44 diverse animals represented exquisitely and imaginatively in jewellery by Jane Dodd in exhibition The Kingdom , up in a Victorian-era attic stuffed with dead animals at Tūhura Otago Museum in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
The exhibition has ingeniously been designed like a phylogenetic tree - a diagrammatic colour-coded visual representation of the evolutionary relationships between organisms.
Jane Dodd's white ants at Tūhura Otago Museum Photo: Tūhura Otago Museum
The Kingdom at Tūhura Otago Museum Photo: Tūhura Otago Museum
From coral to humans, by painstakingly making by hand small precious objects (often to hang round our necks) Dodd makes us pause to consider the preciousness and precariousness of our relationship with other animals.
There’s wit in her choice of the parts of animals she chooses to craft, but also a nod to our savagery.
That’s given a huge charge with this exhibition being held surrounded by specimens humans have stuffed, pinned, mounted, pickled and preserved.
In Hiding 2019 Photo: Jane Dodd
"I want to look at issues of extinction and infestation, cruelty and conflict: issues that arise at every branch of our Family Tree,” she wrote recently.
“I want to berate us for thinking we are above or distinct from the natural world. I want us to feel that we are being watched and that stock is being taken. I want us not to get away with it."
Jane Dodd has been exhibiting for over 30 years.
Her jewellery has been honoured by selection for the world renowned Schmuck festival in Munich in 1997 and a survey exhibition at the Dowse Art Museum in 2021.
Dodd first came to public prominence however as a musician.
When Every Tusk is Gone 2018 Photo: Jane Dodd
At age 17 she was a founding member of The Chills and went on to be a longstanding member of The Verlaines and the Able Tasmans. For a number of years she also was a librarian at the Elam Fine Arts Library at the University of Auckland.
She joined Mark Amery on Culture 101 to discuss jewellery, music, libraries and our place in the animal kingdom.
