Amberif Design Award

Apart from the Fair’s primary function as an effective meeting place for Buyers and Sellers, it is a long-standing tradition of the AMBERIF International Fair of Amber, Jewellery and Gemstones to support non-commercial activities aimed at promoting Baltic amber. These activities, with an established renown, include Amberif Design Award / Elektronos, the international competition which focuses the attention of artists who use amber in their artistic work. Every year, the post-competition exhibition becomes a medium to compare the artistic statements on a specific amber topic.

Apart from renowned artists, goldsmiths and designers with well-known names, there are also young designers, the majority of them art college students and graduates, for whom the presentation at the competition becomes a stage for spectacular debuts, with an additional motivation of the attractive prize sponsored by the Mayor of the City of Gdańsk. The ever growing number of contestants is testament to the inspiring role of the Amberif Design Award as an important artistic and industry event not only in Poland. The participants in the Competitions so far come not only from Western European countries with their established art education systems, but also – which is especially important – from Russia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and even such exotic countries as Taiwan and Mexico. This allows us to hope that these artists will be faithful to amber in their further artistic and designer endeavours, systematically raising the quality of amber jewellery design and its profile among the public throughout the world.
To be sure, the aspect of promotion is one of the primary and most important reasons for which the development of the Amberif Design Award is so vital to the entire amber industry, even if, contrary to some manufacturers’ expectations, it does not provide ready-to-copy designs and solutions. It is thanks to this, however, that there is a sufficiently justified pretext for many young and creative designers, who feel invited to compete with each other every year, while many of them remain in the market individually developing and elaborating on the ideas inspired by the Competition topic, which often yield entire collections; the artists themselves, by then as AMBERIF exhibitors, enjoy not only further artistic, but also market success.

Today, we are also witness to the adjustment of the market of professional design services, which are beginning to be used by large manufacturing companies with increasing boldness and effectiveness. 3D computer design, together with hi-tech prototype generating technologies, called “rapid prototyping,” are a serious challenge to traditional handicraft and will require designers to use a new method for creating their product and new professional skills. That is why the Amberif Design Award – by design – has become a sort of “laboratory” of form, in which the focus is on finding solutions which far exceed today’s stylistic standards, resulting from the current demands of the manufacturers. Artistic experiments, authors’ commentaries and statements which are often radical and controversial, works from the borderline between jewellery and body art, which are looking for references to other visual art forms, allow us, the viewers, to look at Baltic amber beyond the stereotype known from the jewellery shop and to see unexpected features in it. These features are exposed by the topics of the Gdańsk competitions, which focus the artists’ attention on specific properties of this unusual material in as wide a context of cultural phenomena and processes as possible. Apart from topics referring to myths, symbols and emotions (e.g. The Amber Route, Inclusion, Natural Mystic, Symbols of Love), we have had especially interesting interpretations at those editions of the Amberif Design Award, which looked for the appropriate company for amber (e.g. Amber + Diamond, Amber + Gold, The Organic Product).
The Competition’s high profile is confirmed by the names of its jurors from Poland and abroad: artists, teachers at prestigious colleges, trade journalists and amber experts. It is enough to mention but a few of them: Prof. David Watkins, lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London; Dr Fritz Falk, long-standing director of the Schmuckmuseum in Pforzheim; many goldsmith artists of indisputable repute, including Wilhelm Tasso Mattar (Germany), Manuel Vilhena (Portugal), Michael Zobel (Germany), Barbara Schmidt, co-organiser of inhorgenta europe in Munich; Veronika Schwarzinger, owner of the Galerie V + V in Vienna and many distinguished educators of Polish art colleges: Prof. Andrzej Szadkowski (Vice President, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Łódź), Prof. Tomasz Bogusławski (President, Academy of Fine Arts, Gdańsk), Prof. Jerzy Ginalski (Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków), Prof. Tomasz Matuszewski (Dean of the Dept. of Architecture and Design, Academy of Fine Arts, Poznań), Prof. Stanisław Radwański (former President, Academy of Fine Arts, Gdańsk), Prof. Jacek Popek (Head of the Department of Design, Academy of Fine Arts, Gdańsk), Prof. Czesława Frejlich (Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków, editor in chief of the 2+3D quarterly), as well as the top Polish jewellery designers and the cream of the amber jewellery industry.

10 years of the Amberif Design Award

The year 2006 saw the 10th anniversary of the Amberif Design Award and surely it is a good pretext to assess and possibly review the current form of the Competition, which has both many supporters and a few detractors. The Competition’s history not only documents the evolution of initially Polish, and later also international amber art, but also reflects the breadth of the political transformations which took place in Poland over the last decade. At the very beginning of the Competition there was a big problem with customs formalities which made it difficult for participants from outside Poland to send in finished works or amber jewellery. These were treated as imported goods and the authorities required the artists – who were usually art college students or individual artists, not involved in business activity – to go through troublesome bureaucratic procedures. Since the Organisers’ intention was to promote the advantages and virtues of Baltic amber mainly outside Poland, the internationalisation of the Amberif Design Award regulations was of paramount importance. The argument to protect foreign participants from additional costs and spare them the need to find their way through the red tape of customs forms led to the decision to have designs sent in the form of drawings, graphics or photographs presented on boards rather than finished works. Even though for several years now, thanks to Poland’s membership in the European Union, customs barriers have ceased to be any obstacle or even hindrance to the sending of finished amber products, the Amberif Design Award Competition has retained its formula of a design review. The development of graphic techniques, tools for design visualisation and finally the spread of computer software for 3D design justify the clarity of this form of recording ideas and their presentation. Still, however, the questions, doubts and suggestions which arise, especially in Poland, indicate a need to present finished objects, especially in view of the possibility that it is possible to take advantage of the Amberif Design Award Competition results to promote Baltic amber as a medium for artistic expression even more effectively. The Amber Museum in Gdańsk, which was opened in 2006, is the institution which should focus its interests on this form of initiating artistic and exhibition events as a matter of course. The Museum’s further development and its focus on amber will surely help the Amberif Design Award find an exhibition venue worthy of its merit, which will also enable the presentation of the most interesting artistic productions in their original forms, while some of them may perhaps even be acquired by the contemporary art collection of the Gdańsk Amber Museum. In the coming future, the Gdańsk International Fair Co. / MTG SA and the Gdańsk Museum will surely develop a new formula for exhibiting and presenting the competition designs.

The argument to support the current purely design-oriented nature of the Competition and the post-Competition exhibition is the still indisputable fact that they enable the presentation of not only the products of masterly craftsmanship, which most usually are commercial in nature, but also provide the opportunity to confront ideas of conceptual character which are often purposefully impossible to be produced in practice, as they transcend the limitations of execution or technology. We have often seen Competition entries which were futuristic, boldly breaking off with the canon of traditional handicraft and searching for a connection with other art forms, as well as referring to the social and cultural context or even to philosophical issues which would never have become the subject of artistic interpretation, had the Competition regulations not allowed the possibility of an indirect form of presentation via drawing, graphics or photography. Not only are amber jewellers and goldsmiths, experts who routinely deal with this material, invited to take part in the Competition, but so are designers of industrial and other forms, stylists and artists who work in sculpture, painting, installations, non-applied art - especially art college students from all over Europe. It is the important and not unfounded hope on the part of the Organisers that the Competition will prompt its participants to perform further artistic experiments with Baltic amber, and for some of them become the beginning of systematic artistic endeavours which will point out new inspiring directions for the development of contemporary amber art to the entire amber community and to the expert public as well.