One dreary morning last winter, deep in the Cotswolds countryside of southwestern England, the jeweler William Welstead’s daily dog walk was enlivened by a foot-tall three-dimensional head that had been fashioned from the local mud and was sitting atop a fence post.
With limestone shards for ears, the gleefully grotesque version of central African traditional sculpture was the first of a pair created by his neighbor, the artist Jake Chapman, and left there to raise a smile. “I particularly enjoyed its slow deterioration from the weather,” Mr. Welstead recalled during a recent video interview with Mr. Chapman from the artist’s studio.
At first glance, the two make unlikely friends. And perhaps even more unlikely collaborators on a capsule jewelry collection of dinosaur pendants, called “Explaining Christians to Dinosaurs,” to be introduced next month at Dover Street Market in London.
Mr. Welstead, who established his namesake brand in 1998, is known for his gemstone rings whose minimalist settings put the focus on his latest discovery, whether it be an antique rose-cut diamond or a rare star sapphire. (Dover Street Market in London has stocked Mr. Welstead’s core collection since 2009. “He is one of only a handful of jewelers whose work combines a rarefied and timeless elegance, and yet is somehow entirely contemporary at the same time,” Dickon Bowden, the vice president of Dover Street Market International, wrote in an email.)
Mr. Chapman is one half of the former artist duo called the Chapman Brothers. With his brother, Dinos, they found fame in the 1990s for their dark, provocative work and were part of a loosely affiliated group that came to be known as the Young British Artists. In 2003, the Chapmans were nominated for the Turner Prize, the prestigious annual award presented by the Tate museum group.
Describing himself during the interview as “a fully paid-up pessimist,” Mr. Chapman now works as a solo artist and has continued to joust at what he has called the pretensions of the art world and of bourgeois culture in general.
The two men had long discussed working together on a project and the jewelry collaboration was inspired by one of Mr. Chapman’s pieces now in Mr. Welstead’s collection: a six-inch-high laser-cut steel sculpture of a dinosaur from the limited edition series “Hell 65 Million Years BC.”
Mr. Chapman resisted confirming that his series was a miniature version of the three large dinosaurs, made of pieces of weathered steel as much as 26 feet long, in the Chapman Brothers’ work “The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, but Not the Mineral Rights,” unveiled in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2007. Nor would he categorize the dinosaurs, although their angular, two-dimensional shapes appear to be playful interpretations of a tyrannosaurus, a stegosaurus and a triceratops.
Dinosaurs, said Mr. Chapman, 57, are a reminder of mankind’s precarious position on earth, the creatures’ fossilized remains having contributed to the creation of the fossil fuels that mankind continues to reply upon. “The fuel that drives us towards our civilized success is the very thing that will actually end up extincting us,” he said.
“In some senses, the dinosaur is a really fantastically overbearing reminder of the fact that it only takes one kind of celestial rock and everything goes,” he continued, referring to the widely accepted theory that the effects of an asteroid strike on earth killed the dinosaur.
Mr. Welstead, 57, agreed: “Humans have such a sense of self-importance, and yet the length of time we’ve been around is so short, relative to life on earth, and dinosaurs are a great reminder of that fact.”
The dinosaur pendants, which are approximately an inch tall, were made by hand in Mr. Welstead’s workshop in Cornwall. Each of the three designs is to be available in limited editions of 120 in yellow gold and 100 in platinum and to come with a matching chain. Prices will be 2,450 pounds to 2,950 pounds (around $3,200 to $3,800).
There also are future plans for several one-of-a-kind pieces recreating other Chapman dinosaurs in miniature, such as a dinosaur on wheels resembling a child’s pull toy and a charm in black diamonds, platinum and gold, representing the asteroid that led to the dinosaurs’ demise.
Dover Street Market has not announced the date for the collection’s debut, but they said it is to be held during Frieze Week, the art fair scheduled Oct. 9-13. It is to feature a Victorian-style museum diorama, with sculptures of dinosaurs as much as 6.5 feet tall, created by Mr. Chapman; anachronistic Neanderthal figures; and a large cardboard asteroid lurking menacingly overhead.
The collaboration represents “the serendipitous and meteoric collision of two seemingly very different worlds,” Mr. Bowden of the Dover Street Market group wrote.
However, during the collaborators’ video interview, Mr. Welstead expressed mixed feelings about creating art jewelry. “I’m slightly allergic to it in general,” he said, “as I feel that it is sometimes a commercialization or an accessorization of an artist’s name, and I’m not sure that that’s what we’re trying to achieve here.”
He said he saw the project more as a natural extension of their friendship, adding that it has been fun to work on something so different from his usual creations. “The best collaborations come from serendipity,” he said with a smile.
In Mr. Chapman’s view, however, jewelry and art are similar in many ways. “They both extort scarcity value,” he said. “There’s no intrinsic utility to a diamond or a work of art, and yet they oscillate in a strange territory. On the one hand, we like to look at them as holding some kind of value for human civilization and human progress. And yet, simultaneously, they operate at the highest, least regulated end of capital as pure speculative objects.”
The philosophy of contemporary art aside, Mr. Welstead said he hoped that the miniatures would be bought by people who see something of themselves in the figures. That said, he is already planning to give one each to his wife and two daughters. “I’ve said that I’m going to select a dinosaur for each of them based on their personality,” he said. “My wife says she’ll divorce me if she gets the T. Rex.”
Mr. Chapman already was sure of his choice: “My family is definitely getting the asteroid.”
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