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q&a; questions/answers ORNAMENT VISITS NANCY WORDEN Interview by Robin Updike For more than thirty years Nancy Worden has been making jewelry that demands our attention. Worden's bold, big jewelry often looks like ceremonial wear for queens and warriors at the same time that it serves as a lens on contemporary culture. Created with exquisitely honed metalsmithing skills and found objects imbued with meaning and metaphor, Worden's work is ultimately about human behavior, both personal and communal. Her faith in the ability of art to help us learn about our world and ourselves also has made Worden a passionate 16 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 promoter of arts education. The jewelry in your most recent exhibition was inspired by a box of photographs you found at your grandmother's house after she died in the late 1980s. In fact some of the photographs are literally included in the neckpieces and brooches in the exhibition. Why did you finally decide to use these photographs? And how do the photographs tie in with the themes that have intrigued you throughout your career? The Museum of Art and Design in New York City is organizing an exhibition of jewelry with photography and they are including a couple of necklaces I made in the 1990s with photos. I wanted to make something new for the show, so I started looking through the box from my grandmother's estate for ideas. The content of my work has always been about human behavior and the photos provided a gold mine of candid glimpses into the lives of people in early twentiethcentury America, when my grandmother was a girl. Every artist develops their own specific vocabulary with materials and technique. My vocabulary combines found objects with metal and other materials. I only use found objects from the twentieth century, so black and white snapshots fit the criteria perfectly. We didn't use the original snapshots; they were scanned and in many places enlarged or cleaned up a bit with Photoshop. The people at Panda Labs reprinted them on a sturdy photo paper. In the several decades that I have been following your career, I have always been impressed by your talent for turning found objects into the architecture of jewelry. Often the objects are such benign domestic things as safety pins, kitchen utensils, shaving brushes, and typewriter parts. Yet they take on talismanic significance in your jewelry. How do you do that? And why? Found objects are an important part of my vocabulary because they add color, form and a specific chronology and location to my work, that being twentieth-century America. The objects I chose also have to be small enough and light enough to fit into a piece of jewelry and they must communicate my idea. Finding the right objects is the hardest part of my work because each object must enhance and not distract from the idea. The idea reigns supreme. I think scale and the historical sentimentality associated with jewelry can help to create a talismanic significance to my ideas, which tend toward intimate topics like loss, fear and self-esteem. A hair curler is just a hair curler unless you present it in the context of coming of age or hair loss from chemotherapy. The idea makes it into a talisman. You have described your work as being about your "life as an American woman" and that in your work you explore