BROKEN WHITE LINES
This series of jewelry that was made in 2016 and it’s a project that takes its inspiration from the formal language and in the action deconstruction.
BROKEN WHITE LINES
This series of jewelry that was made in 2016 and it’s a project that takes its inspiration from the formal language and in the action deconstruction. Broken White Lines is a sister project to my earlier work, Enchantment, both explore a similar theme through different outcomes.
To deconstruct something is to take it apart or examine it in order to reveal its underlying composition, often with the intention of exposing biases, flaws, or inconsistencies.
The starting point for this project was a baroque, ornamented wooden chair from the early 1900s. I chose this object because of the conflicted feelings it stirred in me, and I wanted to explore that further. I feel an affection for the piece itself, though I'd never keep or use it in my own home. On one hand, it represents an old aesthetic, vulgar in its baroque shapes, overly ornate and extravagant. On the other, I was drawn to that same baroque style: its contrast, movement, and intense detail, which conjure a real sense of wonder.
I spent a long time studying the chair's forms, analyzing the round, curving ornamentation. The longer I looked, the hollower and bleaker the ornaments seemed to become — frozen representations of the past, difficult to reference because of how strongly they carried their own aesthetic and history.
My attention shifted to the lines connecting the ornaments — calm and clear in contrast to the intensity of the carved detail. Reducing the chair to its constituent parts gave me the freedom to reinterpret it: to separate and adapt its elements, and reconstruct them into jewelry in a new and radical way.
For this series, I set the ornaments aside and focused instead on the wood between the chair's heavily ornamented segments — the long, elegant lines connecting its structural points. Carefully taking the chair apart, piece by piece, with a Japanese hand saw gave me a real understanding of its underlying structure and design. I later drew on that knowledge to rebuild the jewelry, reusing the chair's own fastening and joining techniques.
Cutting and breaking the lines gave me the freedom to reassemble the fragments into a new constellation. Diffusing the original form created the space to build jewelry with a deconstructed expression. A pyramid-shaped obsidian stone was added to each piece to introduce a duality of materiality — a counterpart to the soft white wood, this machine-cut, cold stone carries a feeling of precision and order.