There are objects that outlive the hands that first held them. Yul, a theatre and film artist, and the maker behind Relicts.Jewelry, gathers such objects and returns them to the body. Rusted Dreams is assembled from fragments of the Permian Animal Style: duck-foot charms, zoomorphic bird pendants, relics of the ninth to thirteenth centuries drawn from her own archive and from the quiet keepers of private collections.
Each bracelet is less an ornament than a small reliquary, a form around which an entire world can gather. Some of these pieces once served as amulets; others, it is told, were vessels for a shaman’s soul. Relicts does not erase that history. It re-composes it.
An old object, worn close to the body, becomes a modern amulet.
Rusted Dreams
The collection began underground, in the slow labour of unearthing. It took months of searching through antique shops, flea markets and collectors’ drawers to gather the main pieces: belt plaques, shamanic charms, traditional button-weights, rings worn smooth by centuries of wear.
Yul binds bronze, silver, stone and shell into bracelets that keep the patina of their first lives. Nothing is polished into newness; the rust is the point.
Behind the bracelets lies an archive. For three years Yul has built a collection of Finno-Ugric fragments, dating from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, and from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the material inheritance of the Udmurt people of Russia’s Volga region.
Last year this became a sustained study of the Permian Animal Style, the defining grammar of ancient Finno-Ugric metalwork. The workbench sits between two libraries: the drawings of Kama-region archaeology on one side, Jōmon pottery and Dogū figurines on the other.
In her family, jewellery descends through generations. One heirloom, a Monisto, the Udmurt breastplate of coins and cowrie shells, was worn only on the gravest occasions, a guard against spirits entering the body. Relicts inherits its logic: adornment as protection, ornament as belief.
From the Archive
The Artist
An Udmurt from Russia’s Volga region, Yul has spent her life reading her own culture: its language, customs, myths and dress.
Her materials are those of the theatre: wood, clay, leather, wool, shell, metal, each chosen from the desire to work a particular medium. Beyond Finno-Ugric metalwork she looks to Africa and Oceania, to the Shang dynasty, to Jōmon Japan. She wears jewellery the way others write verse, rhyming materials, patterns and meanings, and dreams, one day, of joining an excavation and making a find of her own.
Credits
Design/Direction Yul @yul.lrp5
Studio Relicts.Jewelry @relicts.jewelry