Dr. Helene Vasall
Art historian · Curator · Jewellery historian
To Helene Vasall, mourning jewellery is no gloomy niche but one of the richest sources art and social history have to offer: a ring, a hair brooch, a lock of hair set in black enamel can hold more about an age than whole chapters of the etiquette manuals written at the time.
For Abdruck-Digital she edits the lexicon - and takes you through more than 90 terms, from Victorian jet to the engraved fingerprint.
Out of the store room, into the display case - and out again.
Our Helene read art history and classical archaeology, with longer spells in Vienna, Utrecht and London. What began as an interest in Roman engraved gems shifted, in her later years of study, towards what she likes to call “the small things”: wearable craft that carries far more meaning than its size would suggest.
Her doctorate was devoted to the material culture of mourning in the long nineteenth century - a study that moves between the history of craft, social history and collections research. It was during those years that she learned how a single ring, read closely enough, can reveal more about mourning ritual than an entire chapter of contemporary mourning etiquette.
After a traineeship at a museum with a surprisingly rich jewellery collection came years in various curatorial roles - above all on special exhibitions in which jewellery was read not as a glittering object but as a historical document. Recurring research trips took her to Whitby, into English and Dutch collections, and into smaller provincial museums with often wilfully idiosyncratic holdings.
Today she works as an independent curator, adviser and writer. She writes for magazines, collectors' catalogues and a broader interested readership, often under a pen name - and deliberately without the posture of academic jargon. What runs through every stage is the conviction that jewellery bound up with death should be neither romanticised nor filed away as folklore.
For Abdruck-Digital she edits the lexicon. Her standard there is a sober one: every term gets a precise definition, a historical depth and - where the subject still has a living form today - an honest bridge into the twenty-first century.
The quiet counterpart - jewellery as a historical document.
Helene's work almost always begins in the same place: at a plainly lit table, with a loupe, a notebook and the patience simply to look at a piece before classifying it. Only then comes the research - inventories, auction catalogues, correspondence, sometimes cemetery registers.
Theory is nothing without the feel of the workbench.
Anyone who writes about material has to understand how it behaves. Helene spends regular time in goldsmiths' and engravers' workshops - with traditional punchwork as much as with laser engravers that set a fingerprint into gold to micrometre precision.
That practice shows in the lexicon texts: where it fits the subject, she describes the actual handwork - briefly, precisely, without the romantic rhetoric of the artisan workshop.
What remains of the nineteenth century in the present.
Memorial jewellery did not end in 1910. For years Helene has followed how the form keeps evolving under new conditions - ash settings, glass keepsakes and, above all, pieces that make a fingerprint the central gesture.
How she writes - and why it sounds different.
Anyone who has heard Helene Vasall read out a draft entry notices it quickly: she detests lyrical stock phrases. She has, by her own account, never once embarked on a “final journey”; “eternal rest” she considers a linguistic convenience; and at the word “little angel” she visibly flinches. Death, she says, takes plain speech better than euphemism - and the bereaved certainly do.
Her texts carry the trace of years of museum work: she loves the concrete image - “a lock of hair set in glass” rather than “a piece of memory” - and mistrusts superlatives with nothing behind them. What she observes in a piece she writes down; what she only suspects is recognisable as a supposition.
What she hopes an entry will do sounds modest: that afterwards you know something that was not there before. A name. A technique. A detail that makes a piece of jewellery look suddenly different. She promises no more than that - and anything less is not enough for her.
More than 90 terms - from the widow's ring to the memorial diamond.
Browse the lexicon, ordered by cluster or alphabetically.