JULIA TURNER
ABOUT:
These pieces are excerpts… pieces of experience, magnified like text. Or insets in a map, showing features which would otherwise appear only as pinpoints in the sea. I am looking at intersections in thought, between logic and emotion, between observation and experience, between the impulse to organize and the impulse to release.
My method when making jewelry usually involves pushing a particular material, process or idea to some kind of breaking point at which the piece releases the answer to an unasked question, one which I couldn’t quite articulate in words and which by the same token has to be answered by a physical form. As I experiment more and more with a specific approach and become more discerning about what I see emerging, I begin to see the unnecessary elements fall away, leaving room for a more straightforward kind of interaction to take place. Eventually the free exploration of shapes and surfaces takes precedence over technical issues, and I come to what I think may be the “real” piece of jewelry. Though I tend to set formats and limits for the sake of continuity, I see most of these as arbitrary, and often find myself applying the same technique to multiple materials just to see how they will respond.
I often think about jewelry in terms of its parallels with language, and I feel the same way about working toward an expression in jewelry as I do about working toward an expression in words, particularly in a foreign language. I’m reminded every time I open a dual-language dictionary, or watch a subtitled film, that each language has countless expressions which are simply unmatchable in others. They are invisible until we seek them out or stumble upon them by accident , and it can seem strange that we never quite had words for that particular feeling or situation or state of being. I have that same experience in museums, and hearing music, and looking at buildings…and jewelry, because of its scale and portable, wearable quality, evokes that same response in a very particular way. When I
make jewelry I feel like I am mining a language, looking at its early beginnings and current usage all with the same eye, and that my job isn’t so much to invent meaning as to simply notice where it’s been sitting all along, waiting for somebody to dig it out.