What Is Jewelry Really?

We create and wear jewelry because we do not want to feel alone. But “not wanting to feel alone” can mean different things to different people. The jewelry artist must have insight here. The artist needs to understand what jewelry really is in order to make successful choices about forms, materials, design elements, inspirations, techniques, arrangements, public presentations, exhibitions, and the like. There are different frameworks from which the artist might draw such understanding, including the sensation of jewelry as object, content, intent, or dialectic. All these lenses share one thing in common—communication. Although jewelry can be described in the absence of communicative interaction, the artist can never begin to truly understand what jewelry really is without some knowledge about its creation and without somehow referencing the artist, the wearer, the viewer, and the context.