Julia Turner
Dark Moon brooch: oxidized silver. (5cm x 5cm x 1cm)
These pieces are excerpts… pieces of experience, magnified like text. Or insets in a map,
showing features which would otherwise appear only as pinpoints in the sea.
I am looking at intersections in thought, between logic and emotion, between observation
and experience, between the impulse to organize and the impulse to release.
My method when making jewelry usually involves pushing a particular material,
process or idea to some kind of breaking point at which the piece releases the answer to
an unasked question, one which I couldn’t quite articulate
in words and which by the same token has to be answered by a physical form.
As I experiment more and more with a specific approach and become more discerning about
what I see emerging, I begin to see the unnecessary elements fall away, leaving room for a more
straightforward kind of interaction to take place. Eventually the free exploration of shapes and
surfaces takes precedence over technical issues, and I come to what I think may be the “real” piece of jewelry.
Though I tend to set formats and limits for the sake of continuity, I see most of these as arbitrary, and often
find myself applying the same technique to multiple materials just to see how they will respond.
I often think about jewelry in terms of its parallels with language, and I feel the same way about working
toward an expression in jewelry as I do about working toward an expression in words, particularly in a foreign language.
I’m reminded every time I open a dual-language dictionary, or watch a subtitled film, that each
language has countless expressions which are simply unmatchable in others. They are invisible until we seek
them out or stumble upon them by accident , and it can seem strange that we never quite had words for that
particular feeling or situation or state of being. I have that same experience in museums, and hearing music,
and looking at buildings…and jewelry,because of its scale and portable, wearable quality, evokes that same response
in a very particular way. When I make jewelry I feel like I am mining a language, looking at its early beginnings and
current usage all with the same eye, and that my job isn’t so much to invent meaning as to simply notice where it’s
been sitting all along, waiting for somebody to dig it out.