Sim Lüttin
(b. 1977, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Sim Lüttin is a contemporary jeweller, artist and curator with a career spanning twenty years. In the mid 2000s she began conducting year-long projects, observing and recording daily experiences, rituals and surroundings as source material for her conceptual bodies of work.

At Melbourne Now, Lüttin presents three new pieces expanding on her 2022 series Moment(o)s of Fragility, a collection of intricate jewellery works created in response to turbulent times. These wearable objects use beauty to counterbalance adverse global social, political and ecological events. The series conjures nature’s seasonal rhythms – repetition, growth, death, renewal – to invite deeper engagement and contemplation with its themes.

Using her signature monochromatic silver-and-black palette, Lüttin transforms materials including oxidised sterling silver, hematite, onyx, copper and steel into delicate, poetic and sensitive forms. Shapes echo and evolve across the complex, layered brooch, Reflect (X); the quieter, minimal version, Repose (O); and the ambitious, grandiose neckpiece, Remind (Loss).

Lüttin drew upon her memories of nature, rather than conducting new studies, creating intimate landscapes that elicit a melancholy whose origins can’t be pinned to specific moments. Recent events like the pandemic may have reshaped our lives, our interactions with others and our relationships with nature, but Lüttin questions the extent to which we’ve really slowed down or reassessed our values. Instead she invites the viewer to appreciate nature’s beauty while lamenting its fragility, in a time when our determination to tame the environment now threatens its very survival.

Lüttin has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, appearing at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Museum Bellerive (Switzerland), Museum Voor Moderne Kunst (Netherlands) and the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Japan). She was a finalist in the Victorian Craft Awards (2017, 2015), co-won Indiana University’s Alma Eikerman Award for Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design (2008) and the Robert Harrison Award for Excellence in Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design (2007, 2006), and won third prize for jewellery design from the New York Women’s Jewelry Association (2007). Since 2008 Lüttin has worked as senior curator and gallery manager at Arts Projects Australia and is a co-founder of international platform Art et al. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Gold and Silversmithing) from RMIT University (2003), a Graduate Diploma in Arts Management from the University of South Australia (2005) and a Master in Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design from Indiana University (2008).