40 Facts About Ted Noten

Ted Noten was born on 18 December 1956 and is a Dutch conceptual artist.

Ted Noten is especially known for his Turbo Princess pendant featuring a mouse wearing a small pearl necklace, and his solid acrylic handbags and suitcases containing guns.

Ted Noten enrolled in the Maastricht Academy for Applied Arts in the Netherlands, and in 1990 he obtained a degree from Amsterdam's Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

From 2005 to 2008 Ted Noten worked as a senior international research fellow at the Birmingham School of Jewellery of Birmingham City University in the UK.

In 1998 Ted Noten developed an ongoing project called Chew Your Own Brooch.

For many years now Ted Noten has provided clients with their own chewing kit.

Ted Noten got inspired when he met a stranger on a train, a Jewish man who spoke of the horrors of being in Auschwitz during the Second World War, and about money, poverty and death.

Ted Noten invites other designers to share his concept and create their own work within the concept's parameters.

In 2002, Noten participated among 40 Dutch artists and designers in a tiara design competition honouring the marriage between Maxima Zorreguieta and the Dutch crown prince Willem-Alexander.

Ted Noten intended the tiara, with small portraits of all Dutch queens positioned as guardian angels on top, to be used in church during the wedding ceremony.

The use of guns in Ted Noten's work came about by chance.

Whenever Ted Noten asked people why they carried a gun they said it made them feel more secure, although most of them never actually used their gun.

Therefore, Ted Noten used a funfair machine he called Mr Claw to offer visitors the opportunity to actually touch works of art.

In 2004, Noten collected a large amount of low-price earthenware crockery from a Dutch budget store.

Ted Noten arranged the crockery in piles, fixed the design and had it gold-plated as a contrast.

In 2005, visitors to the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, Portugal, which houses ancient art treasures from around the world, would receive a special brooch Ted Noten designed by using the emblem of the Order of Saint James of the Sword, a famous Portuguese Order of Chivalry.

In 2005, Noten commented on Cartier's iconic Love Bracelet, that can only be unlocked by the partner, by producing The Real Love Bracelet, a silver bracelet attached to a blown glass bubble with a pair of rings inside.

Ted Noten called the project Be nice to a girl, buy her a ring and hoped it would improve the mutual respect between prostitutes and clients, and that it might even introduce a more romantic atmosphere in the red light district.

In 2008 Atelier Ted Noten provided the renovated Rotterdam art museum Boijmans van Beuningen with a multimedia installation.

On November 23,2008, Noten was awarded with the Francoise van den Bosch award, an international prize for innovative jewellery makers, and he combined the award ceremony with a catwalk presentation of highlights from his work since 1995 for the opening of a solo-exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum 's-Hertogenbosch.

In 2009, during the fashion exhibition Gejaagd door de wind at the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen, Ted Noten showed his work The Revenge of the Pearl Necklace consisting of the decomposing body of a pike that gradually exposed a pearl necklace Ted Noten had put inside the stomach of the fish.

Later during the exhibition Ted Noten showed a video of the decomposing process together with the pike's cleaned skeleton and the necklace itself.

In 2009, Noten started, inspired by a card of Japanese artist Hokusai Katsushika, his ongoing Haunted by 36 Women project.

Since 2010 Ted Noten offers people who have quit smoking a reminder as well as moral support by making a brooch from their last cigarette.

In 2010, Atelier Ted Noten participated in the exhibition Contemplating the Void that marked the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

In 2010, Ted Noten designed a life-size apple with a golden stem, topped with a small black diamond, called De Verleiding.

Many visitors then used the opportunity to swap their own ring for a Ted Noten ring, leaving a genuine jungle of rings behind.

Ten innovative international artists in the fields of glass, jewelry, furniture and fiber art where commissioned, including Ted Noten, to create exclusive works for the permanent collection of the museum.

Ted Noten developed an interactive piece called SLOW - Eleven Women and 400 Daisies as an homage to the Mint Museum's Auxiliary women, as well as to all American women.

In 2010 and 2011 Atelier Ted Noten teamed up with Amsterdam-based 3D-printing company Freedom Of Creation to create the Dutch Fashion Awards.

In 2011, Ted Noten used the large taxi driver community of the UK industrial city of Middlesbrough to promote the exhibition The Modern Jewel - In time and the mind of others at MIMA, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

Ted Noten thought of working with taxi drivers after seeing the landmark bridge in the area, the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge, that was celebrating its centenary.

In 2011, Ted Noten designed a white Dior 001 gun and a black Chanel 001 gun with hand-tooled 18-karat gold details, as part of a larger series entitled 7 Necessities for a Woman.

In 2007, a half-hour radio interview was aired in which Ted Noten discusses his monograph with Brett Littman, the director of The Drawing Center art museum in New York City.

Ted Noten explains how some of his most famous works came about and that his intuition plays an important role in the creative process.

In 2006, Ted Noten was a keynote speaker at the Society of North American Goldsmiths conference in Chicago.

In 2011, Atelier Ted Noten participated in the Glasstress exhibition.

In 1998, Ted Noten was awarded the German Herbert Hoffmann Preis.

In 2008, Ted Noten received the Dutch Francoise van den Bosch award, which recognizes an international jeweler whose work embodies exceptional quality and innovation.

In 2011 Ted Noten won the Dutch Artist of the Year award.