Bolo Tie

My new series of works is inspired by Medieval reliquaries, containers that hold the relic of a saint. I am interested in the ways we venerate the dead and living, and within my work, the American cockroach serves as our modern surrogate. Living in a time of cheap manufactured goods and a love for “trash,” cockroaches, are considered the garbage collectors of terrestrial ecosystems. My reliquary jewelry illuminates these once living detritivores and, I hope, directs the viewers’ moral compass in waste management and environmental protection. My art jewelry is in essence venerating the breaking of the natural re-cycle by hosting the cockroach ironically; an agent of recycling halted from itself being recycled by yet other cockroaches. This becomes a beautiful stand in for the inability for the “king of trash” of our time, plastics, from being recycled and therefore accumulating in the natural world.