Frans Beelen creates outstanding, playful, colorful jewelry or wearable ornaments.
What makes her jewelry stand out most is her highly original choice of materials:
she does not use silver or gold, but fabric that she combines with all sorts of materials.
"My jewelry is not just there to look at,
you also have to feel it and touch it".
The unusual combination of fabrics, beads, feathers, minerals (polished and unpolished) shells and other found materials,
not only causes the eye to be drawn to the jewel, it also evokes the immediate urge to feel and touch it.
The jewels offer a sensual experience by their design and choice of materials.
They feel like a well fitted garment.
The jewel re-enforces the self esteem of the person wearing it and it will speak even more so as it follows the wearers movements: it is a play in which jewel and person enhance each other.
When you look at her jewelry as objects, apart from the body,
her pieces are complete and independent works of art,
that work just as well worn as jewelry as when displayed as an independent art-object on a wall, a pedestal or in a showcase.
All her jewels are like individuals, in a style somewhere between "classical chique" and "contemporary exotic".
Their elegant lines and shapes are reminiscent of the Art Deco period.
It is with great love and superior craftsmanship that Frans creates her unique jewelry.
She lives and works in Utrecht, and from 1970 on she has been showing her work on a regular base in The Netherlands and Belgium.
In 2007 she had a solo exhibition in the Modemuseum in Hasselt, Belgium. Since 2008 she has been participating in the artist collective Zône, Leiden, the Netherlands.
In 2012 she stayed as artist in residence in the guest atelier of museum Van Gogh House in Zundert, the Netherlands, where she completed a series of Van Gogh ornaments.
In 2013 these ornaments were shown in the Vincentre, the Van Gogh Centre in Nuenen, the village where in 1885 Vincent van Gogh painted 'The Potato Eaters'.
artist