the inheritance paradox
takes the pearl as both material metaphor and cultural symbol. Pearls embody paradox. They are formed through irritation yet often signify beauty, wealth, and a certain kind of femininity. I use this tension to think through questions of inheritance including what is passed down, chosen or unchosen, and the contradictions that come with it.
Most works are hand-built from recycled and fragile materials that echo the pearl’s own transformation from grit into treasure. Scaled up into oversized strands and sculptural forms, they claim space in ways historically reserved for monumental, masculine art.
These pieces hold the contradictions of legacy, value/burden, resilience/fragility, complicity/resistance.
The smaller pearls are hand-formed studies, layered slowly by touch. One leans into the shimmer and smoothness of a natural pearl, a way of embodying inheritance and a femininity I had often pushed away. Another moves in the opposite direction, darkened through layers until its surface begins to fracture.
Together they ask what happens to fragile things we inherit, and how they shift when we try to hold, transform, or resist them.
Between Us takes the familiar form of a pearl necklace and expands it into something collective. Built from paper lanterns, it leans into fragility and lightness, shifting the pearl from adornment to presence, something you move around rather than wear.
Pearls carry complicated associations: beauty, femininity, status, inheritance. By lifting them off the body and into public space, Between Us asks what happens when those inherited symbols stop being private possessions and become something shared.