Jumble Gym: Playful Randomness in Contemporary Jewelry

Stefan Gougherty creates jewelry that is curious and interactive. Sampling content from trash to treasure, these playful objects are unpretentious and subversive. Exploring the surreal through engineering and illusion, these antics of adornment can confound our expectations. In celebration of our collective progress, Gougherty leverages industrial materials and manufacturing processes to anchor the work firmly within the present. Attempting to articulate this strange new digital world, an aesthetic of randomness is explored through mashups of contrasting realities. Staging collisions between vastly different references of time, scale, and subject matter, an underlying unity can be found among the debris of shape and memory. This is a self-publication of Gougherty’s SUNY New Paltz MFA thesis work.