Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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29 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 would be. As soon as you try to make work based on what you think people are going to like, nobody likes it anymore. So I just go into the studio and make what I want to make." DiCaprio has earned this freedom. Although he began teaching as an assistant professor at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette in the fall of 2014, in the years between completing his MFA and accepting his new position, he served as an adjunct faculty member in the Craft and Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and worked as a bench jeweler and, later, supervisor at Hoover & Strong in Richmond. With the relative stability of a tenure-track job in academia has come the opportunity not only to explore previously untested avenues in his own work but also to open new aesthetic, material and technical avenues in the field at large. Some possible directions for his work may involve 3D-printed plastics, motion- sensing LEDs or bioluminescence. After all, despite its centrality to his art for the past six years, wood has never been a medium that DiCaprio considers indispensable. "I do appreciate working with a material that's renewable," he explains, "but I also think that as a craftsperson it's important for me to get beyond the basic properties of materials. I want my work to be about ideas—about more than just pieces of wood and how pretty the grain is." SEEDED NECKPIECE of ebony, holly, gold leaf, 25.4 centimeters, carved and assembled wood, 2014. MANEATER II BROOCH of dyed holly, silver, 7.6 centimeters, carved and dyed wood with metal wire inlay, cast and fabricated pinback, 2011. Photograph by Taylor Dabney.