Keywords: jewelry, jewellery, craft, making, loneliness, romantic love, intimacy, touch, skin, surrogate
Through an interdisciplinary, phenomenological, jewelry, artistic practice, and interpretive analysis of theoretical, artistic, and subjective phenomena, I aim to examine the relationship between the making of jewelry and loneliness to reveal what loneliness may look and feel like as well as the possibilities for artifacts and/or creative practice to act as a surrogate for intimacy, touch, and/or another human body. From a first-person narrative, the maker as researcher, I aim to bring loneliness to the forefront as an unnamed or concealed emotion in jewelry and emphasize its significance as a matter of social and cultural relevance in seeking human connection. And further, how any manifestations may be interpreted to construct new dimensions of being human as part of somatic and mindful inquiry in artistic research. By uncovering the overlays between feeling and the acts of making, the boundaries of traditional jewelry roles in the studio and in society may be expanded — which could alter not only understanding of disruptive emotions and how they are considered and felt, but also how art and craft are made within and despite them. If loneliness is present and is acknowledged, then the body, the studio, and the exhibition become permissible sites for the public expression of loneliness as well as meaningful human connections with the self and others. Thus, the making of jewelry and the jewelry object could promote presence in absence and absence as presence: something entirely new for the fields of both jewelry and loneliness research.
Erinn M. Cox is a jewelry artist from the United States who is solely focused on making metal love letters for the body of an invisible other as she unravels matters of the heart. She holds a BFA and MFA in Studio Art (USA) and a MA degree in Jewellery (Estonia), and is an Artistic Research PhD Fellow in Jewellery & Metal Arts in the department of Art & Craft at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Erinn is an internationally exhibited jeweler, professor, and published writer on contemporary art, jewelry, and philosophy. For more, visit www.erinnmcox.com