Judith Bohm Parr's latest work is both firmly grounded in a sense of place and yet represents a courageous leap of faith. As a glass artist she is renowned for her pate de verre work and for the gorgeously evocative colours of her tropical images. Yet she has not been willing to accept the traditional constraints either of her medium or its accepted applications.
Seeing potential in the colours, textures and types of glass to human personal adornment, she began thinking about its possibilities in the essentially precious area of jewellery. Conscious of the rigid confines of the fine gold and silver smithing traditions, she researched the ancient and more contemporary antecedents of jewellery and found, in the process, evidence of both the precious and the non-precious. In the latter she saw much more diverse evidence of experimentation with colour than in the former which relied primarily on the quality and lustre of precious stones. This stimulated her to hypothesize that the many dimensions of glass offered enormous potential for experimentation.
She took as her focus the neck as one body zone which has, over the centuries, inspired constant ornamentation - regardless of whether the prevailing fashion has required its swathing in fabric or ever more contrived exposure. In creating jewellery for the neck she has deliberately challenged many of the accepted, if not always clearly articulated, canons. The most obvious of these are size, form and composition. In the traditions of fine jewellery size and worth operate pretty much in direct proportion to each other so that there is an intrinsic challenge in creating forms which enhance a small, albeit perfect, diamond or ruby, for example.
The colour palette is necessarily limited. A small weight of a precious metal and/or a small stone inevitably limits the impact of an artist's statement, no matter how intricate and perfect the workmanship. If one decides to take a leap over the brick wall of the precious, as has Bohm Parr, what lies beyond? This journey began with initial experimentation in relation to size and colour. She found inspiration in the antiquities of Egypt with sumptuous creations of beaded collars, pectorals and pendants depicting papyrus and lotus rendered in pāte de verre beads and dichroic glass which she melded with the colours and relaxed style of the tropics in which she has been immersed for the past decade.
After some unexpected and life changing events she connected to place as well as latitude and her experimentation became at once more personal and directed. Her later work reflects a strong sense of this connectedness and in the process she has become liberated. The final series Botanicals encompasses the neck but it is no longer concerned primarily with encirclement. The neck has become merely the starting or finishing point for wonderful sculptures that contour diverse perspectives of the upper body surprising with delicate colours and shapes mirroring natural forms.
Professor Diana F. Davis
School of Creative Arts James Cook University
President - Print Council of Australia
Visiting Senior Professorial Fellow Research School of Humanities The Australian National University