JEWELRY

Jewelry is art disguised as attire. As with art, a piece of jewelry is an amalgamation of an artist's vision and the material from which it was made that is activated by its placement in a given context. In many ways, a work of art is only brought to life when it is finally exhibited in some way. Once there, it is further colored by that setting and every subsequent setting in which it is placed. Bearing that in mind, jewelry can be understood as a kind of installation art that is only fully realized once incorporated into the aesthetic of its wearer. Through its harmonies and discords with the wearer's appearance and other stylistic choices, the piece is able to speak to both the wearer's and the artist's individual points of view. Every time that the overall aesthetic context is altered, whether through different garments or a different wearer, a new aspect of that perspective is articulated.

Jewelry dates back as far as the Cro-Magnon era and was used then, as now, to enhance beauty, to suggest emotion, to indicate wealth and power, or as a symbol of spirituality. In the early stages of the medium, choice materials were bones, teeth, and stones. As technology advanced, they were joined by a wide array of metals, precious and semi-precious stones, and eventually plastics, composite, and synthetic materials. While jewelry was once an adornment reserved for the upper classes, greater accessibility to and variety of materials have now made fine jewelry available to a much wider range of consumers. For contemporary jewelry designers, this combination of new materials and more diverse wearers allows for infinite possibilities regarding the ways a piece of jewelry can be conceived and presented.