Anke Kindle pays homage to the invisible labour of street cleaners with a jewellery practice that turns brushes into jewels.
(A message to the reader.)
Street Sweepers is my ongoing collaborative jewellery project with Melbourne’s Street Sweeping fraternity. The project contains a photographic component which is shown alongside custom-designed jewellery objects. The photographs document the street sweeping machines and in particular focus on close-ups of the brushes and mechanisms that animate the machines.
I conceived this project to illustrate and document the otherwise unseen work and labour of the street sweepers and to translate metrics into precious, wearable jewellery works that are closely linked to the body as a means of contemplating work that is industrial yet knowledgeable and intricate in its own right.
Jewellery and, in particular, the tactility of brushes was used as an intimate form of object that allows the viewer to focus closely and intimately on the various aspects of labour allowing for touch and contemplation.
Street Sweepers took the form of an exhibition that was first shown at Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne in October of 2023. The exhibition took place in the intimate setting of a small gallery space approximately 6 x 4 metres. Each wall displayed a distinct and unique series of jewellery pieces to create a story which I will discuss in more detail here.
The western wall sported a series of five neckpieces together with five photographs that showed different street sweeping machines as well as close-ups of these machines. The noticeable feature of the photographs was a keyhole mechanism that allocated the brush platform to be mounted onto the rotating machine part. The brushes are a pale industrial yellow and are angled outwards.
Anke Kindle, Installation view of Street Sweepers Exhibition at Brunswick Street Gallery, 2023
All these seemingly small features found their elements in the design work as a basis for the jewellery pieces.
The jewellery pieces are a saw-pierced elongated silver ellipse with keyhole details also pierced into the silver. Three neckpieces feature brushes in industrial yellow that are made from horsehair and bound into industrial-coloured nylon. The brushes slide up and down in the keyhole track to reiterate the moving part of the street sweeper machines. Two neckpieces are plain silver with keyhole details to emphasise the machine’s beautiful and engineeringly ingenious locating mechanism.
Each neckpiece has a lanyard in black and yellow cotton which plays on the colour of barrier tape and the high-vis devices that are often used when observing parts of the street sweeping machines. This colour scheme is further repeated in the brush plate covering the neckpieces’ brush component.
Anke Kindle, Street Sweeper Necklace, 2023, Sterling Silver, Cotton, Horse Hair, Nylon, Paint,
(550mm x 55mm x 10mm)
The northern wall showed five rings together with five different makes of street sweeping machines. This series was entitled Sweepers Portraits. Each ring carried the title of a different make of street sweeping machines such as the German-made “Bucher” and “Schwarz” vehicles for instance, and the English “Mac Donald Johnson” sweeper.
Anke Kindle, Street Sweeper Portrait, 2023, exhibition photograph on cotton rag paper (is translated into a miniature container ring)
For the street sweeper portraits, each container that captures the debris is translated into miniature a container ring with accompanying industrial fastening mechanisms. The intimacy of the rings allows for contemplation of the machine’s ingenious engineering idiosyncrasies as well as the labour that is conducted daily cleaning our city streets. Each architectural block was carved from a synthetic stone in a colour of grayscale varying from light grey to anthracite grey.
Anke Kindle,Street Sweeper Portrait Ring, 2023, Synthetic Stone, Sterling Silver, 9K Yellow Gold, (35mm x 17mm x 15mm)
The synthetic stone containers were riveted and set in folded sterling silver. Four rings were solid forms set in a folded sterling bezel the fifth ring was folded 9K yellow gold and did not show an architectural container shape but was left in an open folded state. This ring was entitled “Empty” and sat alongside a derelict street sweeper photograph in contrast to the four functioning solid forms.
The eastern wall focused on three brooches each with custom dyed blue fibres as sweeper brooms. This work featured the angled brooms of the street sweeping machines and the industrial colour of the brooms as well as the black and yellow barrier tape that is often found on the moving parts of the vehicle to warn of the dangers and harms of rotational movement.
Anke Kindle, Sweeper Brooch, 2023, Sterling Silver, Paint, Horse Hair, Nylon, (90mm x 60mm x 10mm)
I am fascinated with their movement. All the brushes in this brooch series move up and down and rotate around their own axis as a nod to the kinetic nature of the street sweeper machines.
Accompanying the three brooches were two cone-shaped rings with yellow bristles that repeated the splayed form of the machine’s brushes. This makes the broom an easily recognisable, symbolic and vital part of the street sweeping process.
The broader motivation to use brushes in my work stems from several reasons. I consider the brush as a political object that has the potential to explore ideas of labour both labour that is visible and labour that is not seen. The second reason to use brushes in the context of jewellery is the engineering ingenuity of the brush itself. The simple strength of the construction and the tactility of the object. This has led me to explore the brush as an object of jewellery that becomes closely linked to the body and quite intimate when worn on the body.
Lastly, the space contained a central table that showed two neckpieces both coherent with the graphic nature of the wall works yet also quite different in subject matter to each other.
Anke Kindle, Caterpillar Neckpiece, 2023, Oxidised Sterling SIlver, Stone, Horse Hair, Nylon,
(600mm x 60mm x 10mm)
One neckpiece sported two angled large red brushes fastened to a caterpillar-like, triangular shape. This piece looks most like a reconfigured and re-interpreted street sweeper machine with its angled, splayed brushes that are attached to a container.
The final piece discussed here was an anodised aluminium necklace that played on the industrial barrier tape of yellow and black.
Anke Kindle, Barrier Tape Neckpiece, 2023, Anodised Aluminium, Sterling Silver, Paint, (600mm x 20mm x 1mm)
This piece consisted of 34 triangular, anodised aluminium shapes that were centrally riveted together and moved in an articulated fashion like a lizard or snake skin in an elegant yet graphic, industrial way.
Through the Street Sweepers project and the accompanying jewellery work that resulted from careful research, I intended to present street sweeping not solely as an industrial process but as an act of care. It is an act of care for both each other and the planet we inhabit, celebrating the small gestures we can all contribute to ensure a healthy world.
About Anke Kindle
Anke Kindle is a Melbourne-based jewellery and object designer. She is the founder and head of a small jewellery workshop located in the inner North of Melbourne called S T U D I O B L A U. Studio Blau has been in operation since 2020. The studio has a strong investigative focus and is currently undertaking research that will lead to new work in the upcoming future. Follow @studio_blau
