Why Jewelry?
While in graduate school, the sudden death of my father forced existential questions and a reconsideration of what I wanted to contribute to people’s lives through my artwork. I questioned if jewelry was too limiting as a format, until I recognized that its familiarity offered an opportunity- not a professional opportunity: but a personal and sociopolitical opportunity to communicate complex ideas through a format that invites empathy.

Jewelry is both intimately located and publicly encountered. My work is shaped by this interest in relational experience: how objects mediate social roles, private and public identities, belief systems, and the influence of place.

As it moves through everyday life, it invites interpretation, projection, and exchange. It carries expectations, memories, and assumptions into the world. I then unsettle those expectations through material contradictions, obsessive construction, interaction with the body and contextual framing; ie, mixed media presentation boxes / displays.

Over time, I have created diverse bodies of work while consistently returning to the same underlying question; how meaning takes shape through objects...and how that meaning is negotiated between individuals, bodies, and social situations. My works are mixed media using steel, aluminum, glass, found objects, textiles and incorporate digital photography, etching, laser cutting and traditional metals/processes.

To invite recognition before interpretation - I embrace familiar jewelry signifiers—human scale, fine detail, gemstones, botanical forms, amulets, gestures of adornment. The aim is to make the familiar visible as symbolic. Skillful detail and complexity solicit attentiveness, creating heightened sensitivity in which materials and process become content understood in the context of the personal and social functions of jewelry.

Whether engaging questions of gender / social identity, grief and commemoration, superstition and healing, or cultural displacement, I aim to create work that is approachable yet unresolved, inviting a broad audience to a conversation.