Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin

The decorative arts museum, my first drawing destination, is the emptiest msueum I've ever been in - empty of people, that is - I saw four visitors during the three hours I spent there. The exhibits are wonderful; I'd like to go back, sketchbook and camera in hand. (Many German museums allow photography, without flash.)Marvellous objects of amazing craftsmanship -
This unusual item is a game board with inlaid and engraved metal -
And this is the frame for a medieval purse, the kind you see dangling from men's belts in paintings of the time -
In the modern section, the jewellery included an amazing neck piece by Janna Syvanoja made of pages from a telephone book - the edges where the lettering showed give a very subtle effect, and as to how it was made - I just couldn't figure it out -
Do have a look at the other examples of her work on this website. She says - “The process of making my recycled paperjewellery pieces, involves a slow, “natural” technique. By curving each slice of paper around the steelwire, one by one, one after another, it is as if the piece grows into its shape by itself. This way the character of wood, paper's original material, is preserved in the piece - as is also the association to the whole organic world, the way it builds itself, being in constant change, traveling in time.

"Printed paper has also an additional reality, the information it contains. Now, one can only see separate words and letters, that have been transformed into graphical patterns on the surface of the piece. The previous content of the material referred to communication between people - message and expression. A piece of jewellery is worn for the same purpose.”

The exhibition being installed, which has opened by now, is of glass -
My favourite object was the black box (bottom left) by Mechthild Poschlod, which I looked at so long and hard during the drawing that there was no need to photograph it:
Other contemporary makers I noted (for further research) are ceramicists Pompeo Pianezzola , Gerald Weigel, Kati Tuominen, and Antje Scharfe; jewellers Dorothea Pruhl, Christina Weisz, Hermann Junger; designer Aldo Rossi.