Collections Gallery
A curated archive of handcrafted jewellery collections, along with the story of what inspired me to make them.
Modern Socialist Futurism
Inspired by the works of Wendy Ramshaw, Andrej Szadkowski and Lena Kowalewicz-Wegner, I boldly dare to revisit their dream of a brave new socialist world.
With this collection I aim to invite the viewer to reconsider the future that has been presented to us- to question the apathy and quiet disillusionment so commonplace in contemporary modern life and its manufactured aesthetics. Opposing this malaise, my work looks toward the utopian ambitions of the socialist imagination; the belief that humanity might once again aspire toward the stars, casting off the constraints of capitalist modernity in pursuit of something collective, transcendent, and greater than ourselves.
The pieces draw upon the grand monumentality of Soviet architecture, the surreal beauty of socialist realist art, and the visual relics of 1960's technological optimism; satellites, planetary systems, reactors, and the wonders of modern industry. I re-imagine these things as symbols not of a time long since passed, but rather of the capacity every person has to transform the world around them, and in doing so I hope to rekindle the hope for a better future, one that we will build together.
Suprematist Constructivism
Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life").
— Malevich, Part II of The Non-Objective WorldWhen Malevich envisioned the future of art he was imagining an art unshackled from the demands and constraints of the material world. He sought to remove the artist and indeed humanity itself from being the central point through which all of existence must be perceived. To Malevich, such thinking was immature and undeveloped. In his seminal work "Black Suprematic Square" he taught the world how to portray pure emotion, transforming art into a vehicle for the only thing Suprematism believed was real; raw emotion.
In creating this collection I would like to build on Malevich's earlier work and evoke within an audience a particular kind of emotion; that of the hopeful soviet. The person who dared to dream bigger than the life they had been sold under a state and economic system intended to deprive the workers of their labour and thus their inherent value. In doing so I am taking the constructivist-productivist tendency to create art for purpose and the suprematist belief in evoking raw emotions to create emotionally-charged pieces that remind the audience to dream bigger. By wearing this jewellery you are signalling to those around you that it is okay to want more than you have been given.
Modernism
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Inspired by contemporary arts, I wanted to explore how my own aesthetics may be developed further within a modernist framework—
