"I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson
All the Names is a jewelry collection that incorporates brass frames from mid-1800s Daguerreotype and Ambrotype photograph hinge cases that once framed faces whose names are forever lost.
In 1847, preservers or brass frames, were added to hinge photograph cases. They wrapped the glass, mat and image to protect the delicate photograph. We have taken the cases apart and transformed them into jewelry.
When we come into contact with the past through old journals, well-worn objects, family stories, &c, we are altered by them and them by us. The same is true in the making and experiencing of objects that incorporate elements or stories from the past. What seems immutable is, by dint of our footfalls in the dusty attic, made different.
All of these names, with the exception of Beatrice, after my grandmother, have come from characters in books and are some of the bits that have in some way, made me.
- Lotte, named from Goethe's Sorrow's of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Dorian, named from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- Eulalie, named from the poem Eulalie by Edgar Allan Poe
- Hanta, named from Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
- Valéne, named from Life: A Users Manual by Georges Perec
- Fermina, named from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
- Tereza, named from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- Lucy, named from Heap House by Edward Carey
As the rings stack, new journeys unfold. With All the Names we offer the possibility to wear a fragment of someone’s history that changes yet again when a ring slips onto your finger, or a pendant around your neck.
