news – Gerrit Rietveld Academie Jewellery-Linking Bodies

The Jewellery – Linking Bodies Department welcomes Clem Edwards as new department head

We are very happy and honoured with Clem Edwards as our new Department Head of Jewellery – Linking Bodies. They have taken up their new role at the start of the new academic year.

Clem Edwards is a Rotterdam-based artist from Naarm, Melbourne (Australia) working between language and sculpture. Their practice enacts material, experiential and affective residues of daily life. Busy with enchantment and its implications, their work brings into conversation the possibility of the glittering dream castle and the deep knowing that the Disney story cannot exist without the labour, gender and land conditions that produced it.

Clem has a background in book publishing and metalwork. They first fell for the Jewellery–Linking Bodies department in 2022, when they were a Gerrit Rietveld Academie fellow, and are currently (hand)making brass and bronze hinges with memes on them. As Clem describes: ‘I’m thinking about thresholds, and ways in which we pass through the world – architecturally, politically, gender-wise, etc.’.

Questions they will bring to the department are: ‘How do we engage with a work? How we are invited (or not invited) to lean in closer to a thing –literally or figuratively?’

Forever Linked Farewell to Sonja Bäumel Head of Jewellery – Linking Bodies department

We thank and farewell Sonja Bäumel, beloved head of Jewellery—Linking Bodies since 2017, and teacher in the department since 2016.

Central to Sonja’s legacy is her rigorous commitment to the collective. Sonja is known school-wide for modelling her politics of care and reciprocity, and for practicing her belief that her students, like all people, are continuously shaped by and dependent on their surroundings.

As head, Sonja transformed the Rietveld jewellery department into a place that in practice and in name, linked bodies. Building on her belief that jewellery holds a special position in the extended field, she created a living-breathing example of a department as site for embodied education, attitude and jewellery thinking. Over eight years Sonja lovingly co-created a happy, healthy and close-knit department.

We know that Sonja’s presence over the years has been distinguished by her long-term collaborations, much like in her artistic practice. To that end, we’re heartened that Sonja’s departure doesn’t mark the end of the Rietveld relationship. She will continue her work on interdisciplinary projects with a focus on local communities with Sonia Kazovsky in 2026. Rooted in the Jewellery-Linking Bodies department, the project, like Sonja, keeps its eyes on the broader horizon.

Eight Cubic Meters by Max van Meeuwen: Other Moons

20 March – 24 April 2025

When: 20 March – 24 April

Opening: Thursday 20 March, 17:00h

Where: Eight Cubic Meters, Sint Nicolaasstraat, Amsterdam

Her laughter fizzes in thousands of bubbles against my skin, promising me a darkness that could hold the moon.

The lower I sink, the more her laughter eddies and swirls, nestling between the slowing beats of my chest. She catches my breath between her lips. Kisses me. Her laughter becoming mine.

Other Moons opens the sixteen windows of Sint Nicolaasstraat as portals into other worlds. Using monotype printing techniques on cotton paper, I create figures that emerge and float across the windows. Each print captures a different moment in time, a different piece of the story exploring desire, monstrosity and long lost myths.

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Max van Meeuwen is in her final year of the Jewellery – Linking Bodies department, and was selected through the call for applications this academic ye