Ashley Buchanan

My current body of work is a series of hand-pierced, powder coated jewelry that focuses on image, pattern and decoration in order to reference ornamentation and historical jewelry. Utilizing silhouettes allows me to reduce images down to their most basic form and reference the history of jewelry with a clean, contemporary aesthetic. This is reinforced through a limited powder coating color palette of black, white, various shades of grey and the occasional pop of yellow, which alludes to common colors of metal such as silver, gold and oxidized metal. The use of repeated iconic imagery has proved to be important to my work; by exaggerating simple motifs such as teardrops and chain links while including hints of decoration I am able to create pieces that maintain a familiar identity between the viewer/wearer and the object. It is my goal to create wearable pieces of jewelry that speak to the past, present and future of Craft while maintaining the seductive quality that jewelry possesses.