Fingerbags

1997

These finger “rings” are like little shopping bags, which change their forms depending on what you put inside them. They become sculptures for the finger and move around with the carrier.
For a solo exhibition I sent empty fingerbags with the invitation cards, asking people to fill them with what they liked. I got 100 back and included them in my exhibition.

Empty Fingerbag, plastic, 8x11cm

In the Swiss National Museum Collection, Zürich

David Watkins writes in “Design Sourcebook, Jewellery”:

“Taking as a starting point some small plastic bags with finger holes designed for carrying found objects, she advanced the concept that these amounted to finger rings or sculptures for the hand. They offered a unifying form which would be the basis for audience participation in an exhibition. Inventive solutions would multiply, and the exhibition grow, according to the number of active responses. Participants would also have a chance to win, by lottery, examples submitted by the artist or others. This idea may be fun, but also cleverly exploits a whole range of dynamics in jewellery, exhibited art, social behaviour, politics. Its tacit theme, however, is to expose the intuition that owners of jewellery somehow form a hidden membership or network within society, that they are associated by their appreciation of, and complicity in, its values.”