Narrative jewelry has many stories to tell

Wearing her vagina earrings, a partnership ring, and an adjustable bangle she made for her partner’s mother, artist Tricia Wasney is a living, breathing testament to the possibilities of what she calls “narrative jewelry.”

From the materials used to the lyrical pathways of ownership to the political and social underpinnings of each piece’s design, jewelry always has the potential to become “something more than decoration, something more than just pretty things you wear,” the local maker says.

With that in mind, Wasney decided to reach out to the local making community to see which other stories could be told through an art form she finds both seductively secretive and vulnerably public.

Opening last night and running at the C2 Centre for Craft (329 Cumberland Ave.) until Feb. 26, I’ve Got Something to Tell You… — the centre’s first jewelry-only exhibition — highlights the genre-expanding work of 12 local artists, showcasing the form’s capacity to communicate story through stone, brass, wire and even snakeskin.

Whether at rest atop a lit vitrine or in motion as an extension of the body, the pieces each serve as points of connection that deepen in meaning as they’re coated by the patina of the wearer’s experience, memory and shared cultural understandings.

Take for example a contribution from visual artist Sheri Turner, who took a scissor to her late mother’s Eaton’s credit card, splitting the red, white and blue striped card into two uneven broaches that can be worn individually or side by side.

The bisected Eaton’s for You card, dated 1996, is an example of an artist eking out value from a functionally obsolete item that still holds emotional purchasing power.

Turner’s piece is one of several in the exhibition that builds on the historic, memory-based tradition of mourning jewelry, says Wasney.

Another recurrent theme the curator noticed was an emphasis on recycled materials, which showcases the regenerative capabilities inherent to jewelry making: in the hands of a maker, any bit of perceived detritus can be elevated and imbued with renewed purpose.

That’s something 25-year-old artist Lee Ladell, who uses they/them pronouns, recognized in their burgeoning jewelry practice.

A recent graduate of the University of Manitoba’s fine arts program, Ladell’s contributions to the exhibition are grounded in adaptive reuse and interspecies sharing.

To create The Shackled and the Damned, a diptych in bracelet form, Ladell encased molted snakeskin — found at a vegetable farm in Newton — within the faint blue glass of a dusted off bottle of white wine.

With Oceans Calling, Ladell found aural echoes in a found seashell, repurposing the Lake Winnipeg discovery into an over-the-ear cuff which swings open and shut on a hinge.

“I wanted to do that so it could be either open or closed to the outside world. Some of the themes I was focusing on were protection, defence and concealment,” says Ladell.

“I feel like there’s a sense of revealing in the work.”

The materials Ladell uses tend to be connected to a sense of both healing and protection of both the physical and emotional self, they say. Expanding on their sculptural work, which consisted in large part of disembodied recreations of human hands and ears, Ladell felt jewelry making was a natural extension of their corporeal arts practice.

“I feel that before I was trying to talk about the body without having a full reference of it. Jewelry-making is a progression into more personal involvement with the body,” says Ladell, who also incorporated synthetic hair into a few of their displayed pieces.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, artists including Candace Neumann and Nichol Marsch reckon with both the beauty and the toll of existing within a body that society often polices more than it sustains.

In her piece Less than 1% but not zero, Neumann, a Red River Métis doula, uses the interconnected charms of a necklace to relay the story of a baby being breastfed by an HIV-positive mother; the title references the risk profile of transmitting the virus through nursing.

Marsch’s piece, Untitled, belonging to the artist’s Barrens series, uses ceramic beads to depict various cervical conditions.

Like Untitled, Anastasia Pindera’s She’s A Snack makes direct reference to the weight of existing within a body, specifically a female-presenting one, in a society burdened by the ideals of western beauty standards.

In trying on the elongated piece, composed of innuendo-laden silhouettes, Wasney automatically bows her head, which was the artist’s intention.

Wearing the piece, Pindera writes, illustrates the persistance of body-based categorizations, how they “shape, confine and define.”

As a gestural response, bowing is a multi-valent depiction of both submission and reclamation, “an act of taking back the language used to define the body,” Pindera writes.

When she began curating the exhibit, Wasney says she wasn’t sure how many local artists worked in the tradition of narrative jewelry, but that it quickly became obvious the open-ended medium had expansive, cross-cultural, intergenerational appeal.

To close out her curatorial essay, Wasney quotes Dutch art historian Marjan Unger. “A piece of jewelry can symbolize the happiness of a moment or the memory of a whole life.”

Featuring work from Debra Frances, Ildiko Nova, Karen Schmidt Humiski, Nicole Shimonek, Suzie Smith, Tammy Wolfe and Grace Nickel, I’ve Got Something to Tell You… will be on view at the C2 Centre for Craft until Feb. 26. For more details, visit C2centreforcraft.ca.

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