The Bling Series

Ongoing

The Bling Series is comprised of sculptures and installations, of or referencing, heirloom jewelry. A piece of jewelry being an asset as well as an article of adornment, for a lot of women can represent financial mobility and security, and subsequently, increased independence. My work explores how adorning one’s body can thus be a feminist act of resistance: a reclamation of space; an assertion of one’s agency.

Through my practice, I reconstruct the feminist agency to which adornment is a conduit, making it bigger and louder, wilder and more passionate. I use a diverse, texturally varied array of materials such as steel; bronze; mirror; fabric; gold leaf; and feathers. Building on my interest in how jewelry allows a woman to affect the ways in which she commands space, I play with weight, light, and shadow, to redefine architecture. Furthermore, to engage with the temporal quality of heirloom jewelry - as any one piece of jewelry is in conversation with history, the here and now, and the future - my sculptures illustrate the effects of time, either through natural or created rust, and materials such as dried rose petals.