Marin Neuhard

AVOIDANCE

I find handcraft to be a uniquely stimulating conduit for hyperactivity; grounding me back into my body like a focussed meditation. It becomes obsessive, repeating and tweaking the process until I can cluster together larger forms. I use the physicality and presence required of making to ruminate on uncomfortable thoughts and feelings I experience. Through working meticulously in fine detail, preciousness and pride becomes embedded in my jewelry pieces. The innate pride of adornment acts as a counter power to the abject messes or rot that I replicate. My work fantasizes about what happens when contaminants are left to fester. Abject opulence disguises themselves amongst familiar domestic forms as affective contaminants. Larger structures or domestic objects provide a surrogate body for the jewelry to rest when not worn. Paralleling the messy evidence of life in intimate spaces. The feminine expectation of cleanliness completely removes acknowledgment of an abject existence. A home provides an intimate space to expel, groom, and function in the abject body yet the pressures of a clean woman persist. The dirty and abject seem painfully familiar to me. Dirty woman. Surrounded by a mess of my own making, I feel shame. I often blame myself when contaminants, like mold or dust, begin to appear in my home. The notion of contamination implies the presence of something unwanted, unclean, or unsafe in a maintained environment. Encountering these growths of decay in a natural environment is easily dismissable but when in a domestic space they begin to elicit alarm; they indicate a bodily threat. These jewelry pieces become talismans that protect against the shame of feeling like a dirty person. They also remind me to neutralize the perception of disgust; removing the bias of bodily threat and examine these phenomena with a beautiful curiosity rather than aversion and shame.