BIRGIT M. SCHMIDT
ABOUT
Vienna born and raised Birgit Marie Schmidt received her MA in Goldsmithing & Jewellery at the Royal College of Art in June 2011, following a strong urge of working with wearable objects after being trained as an architect at the University of Applied Art, Vienna in the Masterclass of Zaha Hadid.
Recurring themes in her work are human imagination, storytelling and narrative enhanced reality. She is furthermore fascinated by the potential and meaning an object can possess when in close proximity to the body and how it can make use of the human physique.
For her graduate show installation and collection at the RCA she transformed her own recurring childhood fantasies of wild horse adventures into wearable jewellery pieces. The pieces are a physical manifestations of surreal equestrian creatures, reminiscing early childhood phantasies made up sitting underneath her grandmother’s kitchen table. She used repetition to place emphasis on the reoccurrence of her own infantile world of make-believe.
She currently develops her practice using traditional hand skills as well as critically embracing digital technologies. She is mainly influenced by issues centred on the human condition, in particular body/object relationships and the way we treasure items and our imagination.