BFA, Studio Art (Jewelry and Metalsmithing)

Artist Statement

The past can be a complicated thing for anyone, and our ideas of it are held close to the chest. For trans people, the past has the potential to be quite troubling. Fragile Reconciliation engages my past through objects that alter and recontextualize old family photos I left behind when I transitioned. Each piece in the series reconnects with a specific aspect of my past, and physically renegotiates that relationship. Like looking back at a photo album, the objects reshape my present, casting the past against it like a shadow.

This installation engages the viewer in the conscious reshaping of my past through careful process, material, and formal decisions. In some objects, such as Missed Chances, I cast pine rosin replicas of forms from my relationships with family members to create objects that literally warp with time and pressure. These metamorphic objects use the aesthetic and visual qualities of the amberlike rosin, in conjunction with photographs, to communicate the ways that these relationships have warped and been preserved. Other objects utilize mother of pearl to alter the visual quality of the photographs. Halcyon’s Carrion, a paired necklace and framed photo, uses paper thin mother of pearl to both cast the faces of my family in a softer light, and create a sense of distance from them, as if they are behind a veil of smoke. Every object in the body of work is illuminated from below by a halo of soft light. This light alters and activates portions of each object, in some obscuring and in others revealing information that is only present when looked through, rather than at. As an installation it embodies the way in which the past looms over my present, touching every part of it, and encourages viewers to question their relationship with their past.