Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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38 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 treasures as small plumbing fixtures, perhaps the drain stopper for a bathtub and its attached chain and pulley. But whether she is thinking about nature or industry, her focus is the same. "I create jewelry and wearable sculptures that reflect a world filled with wondrous objects, both natural and industrial, shaped by function. I'm interested in objects whose morphology comes from function." For instance, she was so impressed with the design of the single-celled alga called a diatom that she made a sterling and copper brooch in homage. It has an industrial look. It could be a cog in a series of gears. Once you know that the brooch is called Diatom, however, the brooch's poetic references to both nature and industry are striking. "I was thinking about how this cell evolved to look like it does. The stained glass in cathedral windows is no more inspiring." Sometimes she creates her own relics and found objects. In the necklace called Reconstruction she pieced together leftovers from previous projects. "My workbench is covered with silver forms, failed jewelry attempts and sterling offcuts. I gathered and arranged many of these pieces, cut some up, re-soldered them together, and Reconstruction was born. This neckpiece is a hollow-fabricated and riveted assemblage of industrial-inspired forms. I love how the ball chains move freely through holes of the pendant body and clasp, as if the ball chain were spilling out of the hole like droplets of fluid." In Atomizer Bulb Study: Necklace #2 and Dual Pod Necklace she created "found" objects from the natural world. In Atomizer Bulb Study: Necklace #2 she used atomizer bulbs as the forms to make coffee filter papier-mâché pods. The pods have the delicate, organic, slightly desiccated look of dried seedpods. In Dual Pod Necklace she formed and fabricated sterling cones that look like elegant botanical or marine fossils. Owens's mantra that beauty flows from function is directly tied to her philosophy about working, part of which is that strict parameters can result in surprising, PROTEUS SERIES BROOCH/SCULPTURE CONVERTIBLES of bone, brass, coffee filters, formed, fabricated, papier-mâché, largest: 12.7 centimeters, 2008-2011. PROTEUS RESTITUO INFLIGO BROOCH of bone, brass, coffee filters, formed, fabricated, papier-mâché, 10.2 centimeters, 2011. Model: Naomi Landig. ATOMIZER BULB STUDY: NECKLACE #2 of coffee filters, sterling silver chain, papier-mâché, 10.2 centimeters, 2012. Photographs by John McLellan except where noted.