Elisabetta Cipriani is delighted to announce Pommes de Jong, the first wearable art exhibition in London of the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong.

The Pommes de Jong is an ongoing project that came to life in 2007 in Bouan (Bourbonnais, France) where in the mid 1990’s de Jong and her husband Tom Weyland decided to buy a house. She created a vegetable garden and they planted potatoes in memory of the lack of food during the war. De Jong stored the potatoes in a 13th Century cellar and suddenly realized that she was fascinated by the huge number of sprouts that were growing from the shrunk tubers. When de Jong was asked by a jewellery collector to make a jewel for her, she thought that she might do something with these shrunk potatoes and their sprouts that were getting longer and longer.

Having flowers and seeds growing above the ground and the roots underground, de Jong is fascinated by the enigmatic nature of these tubers. The artist finds in them an erotic shade thinking about the potato flower and what she calls the ‘potato balls’ that contain the seeds.

De Jong specifically conceived for the show in London more than a dozen Pommes de Jong including earrings, necklaces, rings, brooches and cufflinks. The latter are made from the ‘potato balls’ and the other pieces are created with potatoes and their sprouts. Potatoes are dried slowly by the artist over a period of two years and are finally submerged in a bath of platinum or gold becoming seductive pieces of wearable art.

Jacqueline de Jong was born in 1939, in the Dutch town of Hengelo to a cosmopolitan family. Jacqueline grew up experiencing different fields in the creative industries finding her true talent in art. Thanks to this eclectic background she has developed an extremely interesting and diversified profile that can be recognized in her artistic practice.

She started painting when she was working at the Stedelijk Museum (1958-1961) and since then she developed her style increasingly towards figurative. In 1959 she met the Danish painter Asger Jorn, founder of the Cobra group and they became companions. In 1960, she joined the Situationist International.

Her artworks are held in private collections and in the public collections of many international museums within Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam; Cobra Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Amstelveen; KunstMuseum, Silkeborg; Sonja Henny Niels Onstadt Centeret, Oslo; Kunstmuseum, Göteborg; Kunstmuseum, Halmstadt; Museo Communale di Ascona, Ascona; Städtische Galerie im Lenbach Haus, Munich; MCCA, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale de France BNF, Paris; Geld Museum, Utrecht; ABN AMRO; Bouwfonds; PTT; AMC Amsterdam, Amsterdam.