Our bodily remnants, such as fluids, shed hair, and other refuse, confront the viewer with abjection — what has been physically or psychologically been cast off. The abject reminds us of what we try to forget — our filth, our mortality, and the inevitability of the body’s decay. Elements of the uncanny are also included in the abject. In Western culture (at least), objects and forms that elicit these feelings of unease are fairly universal. They cause an instinctual, visceral reaction due to millennia of accumulated cultural knowledge.
My work employs highly abstracted visual and referencial biology of orifices, clefts, tumors, and other protrusions through the tactile qualities of stone. Rather than the traditional aesthetics of gemstones within jewelry, I use veined and variegated marble and quartz for its associations with figurative sculpture and decorative objects. This association to flesh and object is worked into standard jewelry formats, such as necklaces and brooches as representations of the body. In making objects for the body out of both marble and bodily remnants, currently teeth and hair, I’m investigating the juxtaposition between what is prized and what is cast off. The work confuses these emotional binaries through jewelry, questioning seduction, repulsion, and the desire to touch or cringe away.
I have no interest in making work that’s straightforwardly attractive or grotesque. My work confuses these emotional binaries between seduction and repulsion, the desire to touch and the desire to cringe away from an object. Besides visual qualities, tactility in material is vital to the work — how the material warms with body heat, causes static cling, or leaves marks on the skin— and the way in which it impacts the wearer.