Artist Statement
Cracked surfaces, hard steel, fragile enamel, intimate pattern. Activated by their relationship to the body, my most recent series of brooches incorporates the wearer’s role in conceptual expression while referencing jewelry’s historically decorative use and suggested expression of wealth. Exploring perceived ideas of beauty, belonging, and economic status, my work draws from jewelry’s traditional function and juxtaposes it against figurative representations of industrial and personal landscapes. But while such images tend to evoke a romantic attachment to the decaying, the fact they are photographs of the abandoned and not the actual objects left behind creates an impalpable divide between the outside viewer and the photographic subject. In this way the work toys with the vogue perception of beauty in the decaying. Without the images, the forms are reduced to blank vessels. They reference an urban nakedness through line and form found in both natural and architectural elements of a contemporary urban setting. The resulting forms strive to question the relationship of self and location within the context of socioeconomic factors such as class association and wealth.
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