Artist Statement

As a small child, my equivalent of the Narnia wardrobe was the Japanese fisherman’s box that held my mother’s jewelry, collected over a lifetime of world travels. I would sit on the floor in her bedroom, the box in front of us, and my mother would remove each piece with a story–Your grandmother and I haggled for these anklets in a market in Riyadh–and then place each piece in my hand.  To my child’s eye, the idea that each of these heavy, engraved, impossibly detailed, and totally impractical bracelets, rings, neckpieces, and earrings were hand-built, cast in sand, or painstakingly chiseled out of the minerals of the earth was unimaginable.  I assumed the most logical explanation–they had been created by divine magic.
It was the most basic and primal desire to create magic that led me to pursue the alchemy of hand-built fabrication.  Although in the production of jewelry I use tools–hammers, files, burnishers–always on one side is my hand, my flesh, my body.  To understand that the final destination of every piece of jewelry I create is the body of another woman, is to see an unbroken line between my body/myself, and then the body and spirit of the jewelry wearer.  Therein lies the magic of jewelry for me, and it is a responsibility that I feel profoundly in my work.
My jewelry is created to complement the female form.  My jewelry is not created to make a statement on its own, disconnected from its purpose.  I am interested in both shapes that emphasize what is already beautiful about women–necklaces that point towards the breasts, pendants that echo the shape of the womb–and forms that create feelings of power and strength–rings that point upward, heavy cuffs that emphasize the arms and the agency they represent.  Always influenced by my mother’s collections and my own international travels,  I create styles and designs that are imbued with a sense of history, a sense of being connected to people in the past, and that clearly emphasize my jewelry’s “handmadeness. ” Not interested in separating my body from my art, I feel strongly that it is precisely the participation of my body in the creation of my craft that makes it magical.