I went to Portugal to study metalsmith techniques and it ended up changing my relationship with how i made art - how i want to make art but it’s always a transition to changing a relationship/habit. I came back feeling recharged and lost - like reunited with a loved one after something has happened. This is jewelry. This is my art. This is my greatest teacher. But I didn’t know how to interact with it anymore. I was frustrated to not have the same relationship - to feel like I didn’t know it/connect with it.
Mark Nepo said that anxiety is the reaction to freedom.
At the same time I came back to a home that no longer felt like a home. In the following months I had to move out of a somewhere that I called home for a year and half, which is like forever in my timeline. I met - connected and separated from people in small and deep ways. I also met someone that connected with me in a new exciting and overwhelming way - a connection that made me feel recharged and lost. A connection that would demand openness/vulnerability in a way I haven’t been with anyone in a long time.
I left the east and returned home in the west and back to the east and then the midwest and head back east for a few weeks before I got west again. With only a small backpack, 4 outfits, The Book of Awakening and jewelry supplies. The great opportunity to learn how to be human - without comforts and hideaways.
I sat down in the studio again and started to make one earrings, slowly. I made the earring and then had another idea. I kept making pieces one at a time with new ideas slowing building on one another.
The pieces weren’t beautiful in a traditional way. The pieces were rough and industrial. The pieces felt like that were showing something they should be, exposed. The pieces are made with no home - an energy of being recharged and lost - completely human. The story I am telling right now. The story I need to tell over and over again to better understand this place I am in. The story I need to tell to reconnect with this new relationship I have with my art, jewelry. The new relationship in my life that requires all the darkness, space, details, roughness to be out - to be appreciated in a way something loved only can be, completely/actively.
I hope you find these pieces to be truth-tellers, reminders that we are all on this rugged /beautiful path. I hope you find community and healing in this universal truth we are all seeking. We are beautiful/unfinished/evolving/exposed beings - looking for a home/connection/peace/purpose and the only way is through in the surrender into this moment.
You can find the new wares in the AEO shop now.
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