All the cups, mugs, dishes, snuff-boxes, jewelry and other items made of silver (more than 600 in total, including some gold items) were created in the 16th-20th centuries by Bergen's jewelers. This city is a historic Norwegian center for the production of precious metals, and the exhibits presented, in addition to exceptional aesthetic value, reflect the cultural, political and social changes that have taken place in this country over the past centuries. The exposition consists of the collection of the Western Norwegian Museum of Applied Arts, the largest private collection of the merchant Christian Sveaas, exhibits from other Norwegian museums.
Most of the items on display are small in size, with finely crafted details, and in order to truly appreciate them, the visitor must view them from a close distance, which is not always possible when using ordinary museum display cases.
Instead, Christine Yarmund has arranged the silver in elongated glass blocks, which are folded into a kind of "magpie's nest" (the comparison that gave the name to the design is based on this bird's love for shiny things): thanks to this loose composition, almost all products can be seen from both sides (the visitor can go inside this rounded structure) and even from above. The combination of the dark background of the walls and showcases with transparent glass transfers all the viewer's attention to the exhibits: it is they that determine the impression of the exhibition. In order to emotionally prepare the visitor for inspecting the “treasury”, an additional partition hides it from the entrance to the hall: thus, the first perception of the presented collection is “orchestrated”.
In this form and composition, this exposition will be presented for 10 years, until 2019.
