The Damn Things Overlap

This semester, I embraced exploration and an intuitive approach over a specific design outcome through process oriented, materials based practice. 

Contrary to my initial outset, I ended up completely circumventing any personal narrative and opted for non-representation, highly abstracted, process oriented works. 

Obfuscation is defined as the action of making something obscure. I draw threads as fine as human hair, extracting highly energetic curls and forms that are intrinsically trapped in the metal. In this series of brooches, earrings, and necklaces, I center around themes of obscurity and depiction of an interspatial mass or presence.

I begin with bundles of fused silver that are drawn through successive dies and in the process, the ends split, reducing their widths and spiraling out of control. 

In this series, I am collaborating with my material, dictating only the initial conditions and operating as the tool while the silver and its inherent material memory are manifested through these visualized stresses and forces from within. From these forms, I compose the finished work, framing the happenstance and entropy realized through the process.

I’ve become obsessed with searching for a way to allow some sort of spontaneity in meta. In some way for it to speak for itself. With these threads of “frayed” silver, I set parameters and interact or collaborate with the metal by bundling them together,  then drawing them through finer and finer dies. Under their own initiative, through their own innate memory and plasticity, do they then form these twists, spirals , curves and curls that give this metal their lightness, that freedom.That truth. Their own truth. 

While weaving or throwing, you have the ability to interact with your material directly, whereas in metal, the tool acts as an intermediary between the maker and the work. I use my hands and fingers as I would with hammer and stake, to accentuate creases and folds of the finely rolled reticulated silver sheets. 

I arrived at the “V” shape which best expresses a sense of compression; the flowing silver is captured in a copper funnel, the folds weighed by gravity, and its volume constrained by the walls, that give them form as individual links in a “scarf”. 

The scarf as a form is open ended as is its design. It’s neither jewelry nor sculpture - it feels like more of a toy, an active, kinetic sort of adornment both on the body and off.  

Reticulated, distraught, lapping, undulating forms. More of a torrent rather than neat peaks, folds, and pleats of satin fabric 

The walls create a point of distillation - all of that force is compressed and in that weight, it is contained.