Jewelry from Found Objects
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Jewelry from Found Objects - Heather Skowood
The responses we have to materials and objects are what make jewelry a particularly intriguing art form. Whether consciously or not, we choose to adorn ourselves to express our personality and signal how we feel about ourselves, about others, and about our surroundings. The complex ideas and emotions that inform our acts of self-expression are the very things that form our impressions of material objects. This gives a jewelry artist an enormous amount of emotional and physical material to consider when selecting objects to fashion his or her jewelry from. Whether attempting to make one feel beautiful, empowered, or surprised, the jeweler attracts the wearer just as the wearer attracts other people’s eyes by wearing the jewelry.
My personal approach to designing and making jewelry revolves primarily around the physical sensations and enjoyment of wearing it. Often, the jewelry I have designed over the years has been about creating a dynamic sculptural form and about the way that form interacts with the body and space around it when worn. I have never really been interested in incorporating precious stones in my jewelry designs; I find that they detract from the jewelry form and weigh the jewelry down with wealth and status symbolism. I wish for the wearer of my jewelry to find the design and experience of wearing my work far more valuable than the price of the raw materials. It is also my intention for the wearer to feel empowered and unafraid to make a bold personal statement by wearing the jewelry I design and create.
When I began to make jewelry in the early 1990s, sterling silver was inexpensive, so that was the material I used in most of my jewelry. Only occasionally did I incorporate such unusual found objects as pen caps, bullet shells, glass lenses, rusty washers, or pompoms. I incorporated these materials on occasion, but my first love has always been metal. The goal was to produce the interesting sculptural forms with materials that appealed to me, whatever those might be. Simply put, environmental concerns were not exactly in the forefront of my mind. But as information became more readily available online, I began to read about metal mining and its impact on our environment. This information from organizations like Ethical Metalsmiths and Earthworks (see chapter 5 for more on this) was impossible to ignore.
Today, raw materials such as grains for our food production and metals for manufacturing are becoming too expensive, monetarily and ethically, for us to sustain. After a long period of careless, thoughtless consumption, we are now aggressively questioning the origins of the goods we purchase. As artists, we are doing the same, questioning how and where our raw materials are produced. Though the road ahead of us is still long, these questions are beginning to change the ways individuals and companies are sourcing materials, and artists are looking for less environmentally aggressive alternatives in our jewelry making practices. More and more jewelry companies are vowing to self-regulate, develop certifications, and offer services and goods that are more ethically and environmentally mindful. Though this is great news, we still need to ask for a lot more transparency in the production and sourcing of materials like precious metals, jewelry findings, and gemstones.
An alternative to using traditional jewelry materials is