steven KP
pick-up-sticks
steven KP is an artist, jeweler, and educator based in Providence, Rhode Island. Their studio practice explores empathy, material culture, and queer experience through carved wooden forms, knots, and gestures that examine relationships between bodies, objects, and memory. KP received their Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in Jewelry and Metalsmithing and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Metals and Painting from the University of WisconsinMadison. They currently teach as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Program Area Chair of Jewelry and Metalsmithing at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. KP’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the 2026 edition of Schmuck, and is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and the RISD Museum, Providence. KP’s work and critical writing has been widely featured in publications such as Metalsmith Magazine, Ornament Magazine, The Decorative Arts Trust, Art Jewelry Forum, and German arts and culture magazine, Art Aurea. They are a Center for Craft Teaching Artist Fellow and a 2026 Art Jewelry Forum Young Artist Award Finalist.
RE-ROOTED and RE-ROUTED: STEVEN KP’S “SPECULATIVE HEIRLOOMS”
steven KP is an artist best-known for meticulously crafted neckpieces, brooches and objects hand-carved from wood, which surpass sheer beauty to present as sensory medleys of sight, touch, and heritage. There are, in fact, few jewelers today who are able to blend message, material, and methodology as seamlessly as KP and also integrate them gracefully, with the human body, when worn. Wood is at the core of KP’s oeuvre. “[It] is a storyteller in its own materiality,” KP states, “carving is a unique reciprocal practice that necessitates acknowledging the material agency of what you are carving.” Mentored by their German-born grandfather, a thirdgeneration carpenter/cabinet-maker and Holocaust survivor, who was forced to abandon his familial possessions when he fled the Nazis, KP embraces wood as the perfect material with which to create “speculative heirlooms”—objects capable of connecting people, place, and experience, within the framework of time. KP utilizes deep hues, perhaps due to the connection between darkness and preservation exemplified by Victorian mourning jewelry made from bog oak, a wooden substance which in highacidity environments that conserve and maintain high-tannin timber, such as bogs (spongy wetlands comprised of rotting plants and moss), not only demonstrates the retardation of the hardwood’s decay but also its protection within that ecosystem. Regarding bog oak as a valiant symbol of survival, KP creates their own bog wood by a process of “ebonization”—enhancing the pre-existing tannins and proteins in the selected hardwood with a “tea” brewed from the sawdust produced by carving and sanding the wood and then reintroducing this tannin-rich mixture to the wood’s surface, in tandem with an oxidizing solution obtained by dissolving steel nails in vinegar.
KP’s latest series, pick-up-sticks, grew out of their prior Knot series, an illustrative characterization of the survival of tree knots, which, despite imperfections, still grow and develop—a tree’s “phantom limbs,” so to speak—as well as Deviant Lines, the series succeeding Knots, for which KP was additionally concerned with touch and connection, as demonstrated by branch-like forms of darkened walnut that separate at strategic points, to stand alone, but ultimately lean toward one another in mutual support. With pick-upsticks, KP delves more deeply into themes of loss, missed opportunity, entanglement, and renewal, but they now seek facilitators for “re-sticking,” or reconnecting, that which has broken apart. KP views the hand-carved wooden leaves, from which the works in pick-up-sticks are partly composed, as “divination tools” (implements randomly scattered by a seer in order to predict the future), to be reassembled by KP as reconnectors for things that have “dis-membered,” a protestation against loss. Recycled silver, which has been melted to form ingots, is the prime motivator in pick-up-sticks. Nonetheless, KP’s return to metal is far more than simply a desire to revisit formative skills; it is an urge to explore the concept of heirlooms, typically made from metal, more fully for their social and emotional impact, as well as in commemoration of their grandfather’s wartime displacement and consequent loss. Technically, KP regards forging silver in a like manner to that of carving wood (for which they incidentally use a jeweler’s saw and flex shaft and then a combination of jeweler’s files and carving knives), since tool marks, whether hammered or chiseled, exist as evidence of “growth scars,” with each leaf additionally mimicking the grain structure of the individual piece of wood from which it was created.
pick-up-sticks centers on the interdependence of vines and leaves as a symbol of connectivity, continuity, mutual nourishment, and the resulting integration between nature and humans, as well as within each species. KP addresses the question of independence/dependance by first pin-setting (a devise used in setting pearls) leaves carved from black walnut to hand-forged and oxidized silver vines and then tying them with oxidized linen bookbinding thread. KP focuses on the agency of these secured attachments to not only act as signifiers of strong bonds but also as catalysts for “re-stitching” that which has gone asunder. In their exquisite jewelry steven KP seeks to create pathways forward, confronting how knowledge and language transcend generations and change over time to become “trail markers,” not only signifying that someone has passed through but suggesting it is safe to traverse that path again. They offer a message of hope with pieces that can also be shared communally, by transference from one person to another, not only via physical connection with the actual object, but by a “patination” achieved through contact with each wearer’s individual skin. steven KP’s jewelry functions as “mediators of connection and nourishment…[thus] becoming devices against alienation,” as well as heirlooms to hold for the future.
- Toni Greenbaum
pick-up-sticks, three hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread pendant 5.5x2.5x1.75” box: 6.5x4x2” silver and linen cord 34” 2026
pick-up-sticks, two hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread pendant 5x3x1.25” box: 6.5x4x2” silver and linen cord 34” 2026
pick-up-sticks, nine hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread necklace 7.75x7.75x1.75” box: 10x10x2” 2026
pick-up-sticks, eight hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread brooch 8x5.25x1.75” box: 8.5x5x5” 2026
pick-up-sticks, five hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread brooch 7.75x3.5x1.25” box: 9.5x5” 2026
pick-up-sticks, seven hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread brooch 8x5x1.75” box: 9.x5x6.5x2” 2026
pick-up-sticks, ___ of 25 cast and fabricated bronze, linen thread edition of 25 pendants each pendant 2x1x1” 2026 $195 each
price list pick-up-sticks, three hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread pendant 5.5x2.5x1.75” box: 6.5x4x2” silver and linen cord 34” 2026 $2200
pick-up-sticks, two hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread pendant 5x3x1.25” box: 6.5x4x2” silver and linen cord 34” 2026 $2200
pick-up-sticks, nine hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread necklace 7.75x7.75x1.75” box: 10x10x2” 2026 $4400
pick-up-sticks, eight hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread brooch 8x5.25x1.75” box: 8.5x5x5” 2026 $2800
pick-up-sticks, five hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread brooch 7.75x3.5x1.25” box: 9.5x5” 2026 $2400
pick-up-sticks, seven hand-carved and ebonized black walnut wood, forged and oxidized silver, linen thread brooch 8x5x1.75” box: 9.x5x6.5x2” 2026 $2600
October 24 - November 13, 2026