Promise & Ruin

As a maker, I am interested in the life of an object, the ways in which it shows signs of change and how this transformation is reflected in our own bodily transformations. The jewellery in Promise & Ruin comes to embody this through a process of form finding, cutting, bending, painting, sanding and attaching. I find the forms of this work in discarded paper paraphernalia and street debris. I search for ways to situate them on the body and then translate them into sheet metal, coated with the durable enamel paints I used to paint figurines in my childhood. As I work slowly through the process of bending and painting each one, I find ways for form and colour to connect with my memories and experiences.

Haberdashery

My thinking through this work has centered on ribbons and buttons, things we use for function and decoration in adornment. I’m pulling them away from function and fully into the sphere of decoration. Of course, even a purely decorative object has a function, so when I use that word in this context, I refer to the use of ribbons and buttons as clasps, closures and ties. I’m using them as surfaces to paint and add colour to, as canvases that loop, bend and interact with each other as they drape across the body. They remind me of sitting in my mum’s sewing room and playing with the materials in her boxes of haberdashery.

My closeness with my mother, sharing her love for craft and spending so much of my childhood making things with her, was a source of shame for me as a child. Never during the time we spent together, only when those parts of me were revealed to others. Our relationship nurtured the feminine and flamboyant in me, qualities I could be ridiculed for in certain social spaces. I’m learning to embrace the child in me, the feminine and the flamboyant, the part of me that enjoys playing with ribbons and buttons and creating fabulous things with color and form. While making the first brooch in this group (Pussybow No.1) I was thinking about anxiety and getting tongue tied or choked-up, so I tried to put a knot in my sheet metal. I didn’t associate it with the “pussybow” until I finished forming it and decided to place it at the throat. That word, meant for a necktie, has insulting connotations but the form it describes is frequently worn by women and (mostly queer) men to empower and embolden through some wonderfully flamboyant decoration/adornment. This work is made for those who find their power through these things.

Cut, Bend 2022/23

I think of these pieces like talismans made in reverse, in that the intention imbued within their form came through their creation, rather than their form being designed to reflect their intention (such as when a maker selects a visual symbol in the design process). Color, attachments and placement on the body are the contributing factors in designating their talismanic purposes. Subversive coding, red flags, catastrophe, mutability, deep connection, unrequited love and idyll – the title of each piece alludes to their narrative, which remains inscrutable without text or conversation, but solicits connection. In this way, I can explore immediate and hidden thoughts and feelings as they bubble up to the surface of my consciousness through the work of my hands.

Warning sign – red flag or helpful advice

Wildfire – climate catastrophe vs nature

Go-betweens – a state of mutability

Butterfly child – feeling connected to someone, like a twin

Delphinium blues – unrequited love

Cut, Bend 2020/21

I started these pieces while working towards my MFA but my graduation was interrupted by the global COVID pandemic. They were completed post graduation while I was a Teaching Fellow at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Paths

Paths is the collage piece where Promise & Ruin began. During a Summer residency at The Anderson (VCUArts’ on-campus gallery) in 2019, I produced a 14 x 4 ft collage of paper and house paint, built up in alternating layers. With each layer, I attempted to represent a room in the house I grew up with a paper cut that I glued down and covered over with the colour I remember that room being. After the residency I returned to my studio and used an orbital sander to carve into the collage, tearing through the layers to reveal some of what had been hidden. I kept all of the debris, the dust and the torn paper, produced from this process. Many of the paper forms were intrinsically jewel-like in form, at least to me they were. I set about mapping their shapes and contours so that I could reproduce them in sheet metal. I have always loved the paper-like quality of sheet metal, and the translation of my debris into jewellery felt natural. The resulting collage is a weathered rendering of the memory of my family home. Like jewellery, it permits a deeply sentimental connection that eludes all but the one who desires it.

Cut, Bend

Cut, Bend is a series of work I produced in 2019-2020 while completing an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. The work was made in response to the debris of large paintings on paper that I ground into with an orbital sander. The chunks of paint and paper that came flying off the paintings as I sanded them captured the attention of my jewellers eye. Their shape and form seemed readymade for wearing, so I replicated them in brass and treated each one like it’s own small painting. The hammering and bending of the brass gives them all a unique texture and makes painting them delightfully surprising. They are all wearable and are testament to moments of happenstance.