“Decorative Resurgence,” featured numerous objects of mourning and memory, mostly by young women. The early twenty-first century is indeed witness to a decorative resurgence. In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, Jennifer Zwilling observed that the “Modernist aesthetic so thoroughly expunged ornament from our visual vocabulary in the mid Twentieth Century that the mere suggestion of decorative elements on an object can now evoke a sense of the distant past.”6 The current generation of young jewelers continues to look to Europe for inspiration, but some are beginning to combine European history with American narrative. Rebecca Strzelec’s baseball mourning cuffs connect her father’s passion for the sport with the loss of the American dream, as summer heroes tumble to drug scandals. Quite apart from historical precedent, most jewelers have at some time created objects that refer to a significant personal loss—a child, sibling or parent, a home, a relationship—a loss that for them cannot be metabolized without making something. Life is long; losses accumulate. With time, grief retreats and life goes on. Not the same life, to be sure, but one’s life nonetheless. The personal commemorative object has layers of meaning, some of which may be coded. Work done mainly for oneself, often not for public consumption, may be quieter and contemplative. Lorena Lazard, a Mexican artist, commemorates her father’s death with a contemporary reliquary containing soil from his grave. Susan Mahlstedt uses the form of a classic cameo to allude to the winter landscape that occupied her late husband Bill Ruth’s attention during his illness. Her solitary tree recalls the weeping willows of traditional mourning scenes. Even without the artist’s personal narrative, the wearer could be soothed by its imagery. A rational fear of death also haunts the living. Artist Doug Bucci, diabetic since childhood, has begun to address in his work the implications of living with a life-threatening illness (a “train wreck,” in his words). His brooch Transmet (on cover) invokes issues of body integrity; he wears it as a talisman. Bucci materializes his fear of amputation, the most common consequence of diabetes. The anatomically correct foot becomes the literal embodiment of Bucci’s fear—but he tames it by making the foot a healthy pink; in reality, the gangrenous appendage would be black and disfigured. Historian Christiane Holm believes that mourning jewelry serves the function of “showing and hiding,” 7 and that it is important to understand how “hiding and revealing, absence and presence, anonymity and naming operate to sustain acts of memory.”8 Holm is not alone in
Quite apart from historical precedent, most jewelers have at some time created objects that refer to a significant personal loss, a loss that for them cannot be metabolized without making something.
l or ena l a z a r d Today We Bury You (sculpture), 2005 pure silver, sterling, 24k bimetal gold, epoxy color, acrylic, soil from artist’s father’s grave 3 x 1 3 ⁄4 x 3 ⁄4"
susa n m a hlstedt Winter Tree #1, 2007 18k gold, sterling silver 2 x 1 1 ⁄ 4 x 3 ⁄ 8"
vol.29 | no.5 | metalsmith
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