Rimming Pearls

De parel is al eeuwenlang een geliefd sieraad vol symbolisme en betekenis. Kunstenaar, sieradenmaker en onderzoeker Clementine Edwards vertelt in dit Engelstalige blog over de liefde van Queen Elizabeth l voor parels en macht.

Such majesty, this hero. Arched back, curved neck, flag unfurling to the wind. Man of war leaking muscular lower torso post-victory. Sculpted butt of deepest squats. Upward gust of wind, downward rock of sea and pert pearl breasts a sweetener, dual suggestion of variant beauty across time.

Anonymous, Pedestal pendant with Amphitrite on a dolphin detail

Zoom in. Delicate golden hand turned inward, gathering or being gathered up in a tempest drawn by diamonds. Emerald cut. How the light hits his ribs but they are hers, her ribs. Amphitrite, goddess of the ocean, wooed to be wife of Poseidon by a dolphin made of pearl. Note now how her enamel perizoma swings low and tell me you don’t see it. The red-glazed strap-on fired hard. Rarely pictured with her husband but pronoun regardless she is trans-Atlantic, her transness is oceanic.

Anonymous, Pedestal pendant with Amphitrite on a dolphin (detail), c. 1730–c. 1750, Rijksmuseum Special Collection, 14.5cm. Photograph © Clementine Edwards

Elsewhere, at another time, landbound Elizabeth I of England loved pearls. Motivated by material excess – while famously maintaining a lifetime of chastity – the Queen wished to hold gems, to hold land, to make these things the property of the Crown. (Here I’m thinking of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s writing on the white possessive, whiteness as proprietal, how it operationalises race to colonise and displace Indigenous sovereignty.) In the late 1500s, Elizabeth I granted permission for the colonisation of America.

Spain was already expropriating the continent, its lifeworlds and waterways, and with it came an influx of natural pearls into Europe, the first ‘natural resource’ from the so-called New World. This coincided with a fashion for extravagant personal decoration across European courts (Larif, 2021).

In The Pelican Portrait from 1575, Elizabeth I is clad in a somewhat sexy harness of pearls. The pelican, which was believed to feed its young with blood from its own body, alludes to Queen Elizabeth as the self-sacrificing mother of the English nation. (The Pelican Portrait, Wikipedia)

Nicholas Hilliard, The Pelican Portrait, 1575, oil on wood

Six years later the Queen created the Order of the Pearl, issuing the privateer Francis Drake clear instructions:

"We hereby give order … to bring the Pearl [Francis Drake] did discover on his grand voyage to that our maritime town of Plymouth and there to see her safely kept and guarded. We do likewise give and grant full authority, liberty and power to the said Francis Drake Esquire to found the special and secret Order of the Pearl for the protection of the Pearl and her magic"

Elizabeth I was said to be obsessed with the pearl. Drake was a slave trader and a seafarer and considered a ‘hero’ by the English in his lifetime, and hence in history.

Queen Elizabeth I letter to Drake establishing the Order of the Pearl

Protective talisman, symbol of chastity, the pearl is also sensual, resembling ‚milk and snow’. In the first century, the Roman poet Martial scorned the women of Rome who held them up as objects of adoration. Referring to a woman named Gellia, he wrote, ‘By no gods or goddesses does she swear, but by her pearls. These she embraces and kisses. These she calls her brothers and sisters. She loves them more dearly than her two sons.’ (quoted in Kunz & Stevenson, 2011, 10–11).

Even if mockingly, Martial places pearls at the center of the ancient Roman nuclear family. Picture the Gellia with her love object – what did her kisses and embraces look like, how did she envelop the pearls and how did the pearls envelop her? In what ways, real or imagined, did the pearl interrupt the nuclear familia?

I’m holding these story threads in my open hands, and measuring the weight of the pearls as they roll across my palms. I’m looking at these details, reading into these histories, and thinking about Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s active formulation of unforgetting. Right now, I wish to caress the sensual, terrible and deviant possibilities of ‚detail’ in European adornment, to work against the genre-wash of (colonial) historicisation and classification of gender, race and sexuality that places certain humans at the center of an extractivist story.

I wish to materialise story, up close, in miniature and in reciprocity. I don’t yet know much more. That’s in part what my 2022 Gerrit Rietveld Academy fellowship in the Jewellery—Linking Bodies department is all about.

Meer informatie over symbolisme in de kleding en lichaamsversiering van Elizabeth l vind je hier

Clementine Edwards is a Rotterdam-based artist working across sculpture, film, performance, writing and jewellery, her first love. Her practice is guided by material kinship, which 
thinks material beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family. Clementine teaches at the Dutch Art Institute, is a fellow at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, and soon publishes The Material Kinship Reader (2022, Onomatopee).  

Biography

Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Cara Jones, ‘Queen Elizabeth I letter establishing the Order of the Pearl’, in The Pearl of Plymouth Research Blog, 3 August 2013. https://thepearlofplymouth.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/elizabeth-i-letter-establishing-the-order-of-the-pearl/, accessed 5 January 2022.

‘Elizabeth I (r.1558–1603)’, in The Royal Family. https://www.royal.uk/elizabeth-i accessed 5 January 2022.

George Frederick Kunz & Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: Its History, Art, Science and Industry (New York: Dover Publications, 2011). pp 10

‘Hanger op voetstuk met Amphitrite op een dolfijn’, Rijksstudio, Rijksmuseum.nl. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?f=1&p=1&ps=12&f.hnrCode.section.sort=Special+Collections&f.hnrCode.hall.sort=0.9%3a+Fashion+and+jewelry&f.normalized32Colors.hex=+%23981313&ondisplay=True&st=Objects&ii=1#/BK-17082,1 accessed 5 January 2022.

‘A History of Pearls’, in Sustainablepearls.org. http://www.sustainablepearls.org/pearls/a-history-of-pearls/ accessed 5 January 2022.

Jennifer Ciotta, ‘Sir Francis Drake: Pirate, Explorer, Human Rights Pioneer’, in Literary Traveler, 17 May 2007. https://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/sir-francis-drake-pirate/ accessed 5 January 2022.

Lauren Berlant, ‘Love, a Queer Feeling’, in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

‘The Pelican Portrait’ Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican_Portrait#/media/File:Nicholas_Hilliard_Elizabeth_I_The_Pelican_Portrait.jpg accessed 5 January 2022.

Shihaan Larif, ‘History of the Discovery and Appreciation of Pearls – the Organic Gem Perfected by Nature’, in Internetstones.com, 24 November 2021,  https://internetstones.com/history-of-the-discovery-and-appreciation-of-pearls-the-organic-gem-perfected-by-nature-page-7/ accessed 5 January 2022.

Images

1. Anonymous, Pedestal pendant with Amphitrite on a dolphin (detail), c. 1730–c. 1750,
   Rijksmuseum Special Collection, 14.5cm. Photograph © Clementine Edwards.
2. Anonymous, Pedestal pendant with Amphitrite on a dolphin , c. 1730–c. 1750,
   Rijksmuseum Special Collection, 14.5cm. Photograph © Clementine Edwards.
3. Nicholas Hilliard, The Pelican Portrait, 1575, oil on wood. Creative commons.
4. Queen Elizabeth I letter to Drake establishing the Order of the Pearl. Creative commons