The relationship between the body, trauma, memory, and time is from where my work emerges. I construct hollow metal forms, clay volumes, lockets, and dense systems of chain, to tether, bind, and reflect my ideas. The work manifests primarily in the format of the necklace which addresses the neck, the chest, and the gut; sites of the body in which trauma resides. When trauma occurs, the reliability of our gut instincts, the sensations in our chest when something isn’t quite right, the way the hair stands up on the back of our neck when something chilling is near all become untrustworthy guides. The necklaces hang and drape around these sites and translate the experience of what it means for trauma to make a home out of your body. Many of the works carry substantial material weight while others only appear to be heavy and are light when worn, evoking a complex relationship between object and body. Much like trauma, these works evade language and visual perception.

Though trauma sits heavy like lead in the body, it has a life force as it settles into every fragment; a foot, a fold of the stomach, the hair. Blank ovals, lockets, and vessels become spaces of neutrality, spaces to hold or settle memories running loose in the body. To articulate the heaviness of holding trauma and to evoke the body through the work, I lean into and manipulate the communicative power of materiality and methodology. I knot, cluster, smush, tangle, braid, and bind material to create an empathetic exchange through each object. The objects stimulate an exchange of weight, entanglement, suffering, endurance and healing between my body and the wearer's body, between the wearer's body and the viewer.

paigevandoren.com /// @paigevandoren /// pevandoren@gmail.com