My Word!

The other day I was completing yet another show application, this one allowing more in the way of an artist's statement than most do, so I took the opportunity to revise my older statement a bit. Among other things, I wrote about my wabi-sabi line:

In this body of work, I explore the contrasts between organic and geometric forms, natural and manufactured materials, transience and permanence.

I stopped there for the purposes of the application, but after looking at it for a few days, I feel the need to elaborate. Just a little.

I don't start out with these principles in mind, I make what pleases my eye during the process. But in describing the resulting objects after the fact, these contrasts do comprise the guiding aesthetic in these pieces. Organic and geometric: I've got torn edges, crumpled forms, and rectangles and straight lines of wire connecting things up. Natural/manufactured: paper made of cotton fiber, earth pigments, with resin. Silver and nylon. Transience and permanence: again, paper, crumpled and worried, but set in a form that will last a while with the help of the resin.

I think these contrasts are especially powerful expressed in jewelry. Here's where jewelry as art has an advantage over other mediums, as the contrasts expressed in the jewelry are echoes of the contradictions of our human bodies themselves and our attempts to preserve, beautify, and modify them. Even the very act of wearing jewelry is a part of this system of contrasts.