Grown Jewelry Isn't Forever
At the CODA Museum in 2024 I showed the Magic Mushroom Necklace under the theme of tangible time and wearable dreams.
The phrase has stayed with me, because time is really the material underneath all my work.
Most fine jewelry is a bet against time. Gold and diamonds are chosen because they refuse to change.
You buy them, in part, to hold a moment still: an anniversary, a vow, a name. There is something moving in that, and something a little defensive too, as if we could freeze one instant against everything that moves.
A grown object proposes a different relationship.
It comes from an organism whose whole genius is change: building, sensing, transforming, giving way. When I stop its growth and finish it into a piece you can keep, I am doing something quietly deliberate.
I am choosing a single moment out of a living process and asking it to stay. Permanence here is not the material's nature. It is a decision, made with care, in full awareness of what the material is.
That, to me, is a more honest kind of keeping.
Not the fantasy that an object will outlast the earth, but the choice to hold onto one form of a thing that was, and could have kept, changing.
A living archive rather than a frozen one.
So when you wear a piece of mine, you are not wearing a claim on forever. You are wearing a moment I chose to keep, from a material that taught me why the choice matters.
That feels closer to how we actually live inside time: not above it, but held in it.
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