Approaching the Brooch
I am so excited to be a part of this amazing exhibition put together and created by the MFA and BFAs of Indiana University of Bloomington!
Barnacles in the ocean are typically filter feeders that can be parasitic when attached to a living, moving host. For this piece, I wanted to build whimsical, land-locked barnacles that live by attaching to human hosts. Each barnacle brooch is magnetically attached to the host’s clothes and placed in various areas on the body.
The show will be open Friday, Nov. 1st from 5-8 pm at the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center in downtown Bloomington, IN. Below is an excerpt about the exhibition from the IU Metals Instagram page:
Curated by BFA student Jordan Porter, “this collection of ‘brooches,’ created by the Metalsmithing + Jewelry Design students of Indiana University, attempts to alter and further define what falls within the category of ‘brooch’ by utilizing atypical connection points and placements on the body.”
“The brooch is an object with thousands of years of history—its oldest know incarnations dating back to the Bronze Age—and over the centuries its format has remained relatively consistent. The prototypical image of this form of body adornment is that of an ornament affixed to the wearer’s clothing via a pin mechanism somewhere near the breast or shoulder. But how limiting is this archetype? Can these traditional aspects be changed while still ending up with an object of the same name?” —@jjporter96