ITS UNDER YOUR SKIN

I have seen jewellery move. It’s always had legs of sorts, a brain, and intelligence. Out of the corner of my eyes, I see it crawl up and down your body. You see yourself wearing jewellery but I see jewellery living on you. Every day, I scrape the blooms of jewellery from my body. Whatever root has taken under my skin produces endless shoots of silver, stone, and shell. It reproduces not only in my blood but by my own hand, and by my own activity…

IT’S UNDER YOUR SKIN is my Design Honours thesis, exploring the co-determinate relationship between our designing and our (thoroughly designed) environment. Alongside a body of jewellery work are diegetic pin-boards and video, contributing to an immersive installation. The jewellery appeals to horror tropes, suggesting a weird subjectivity that has long influenced human culture, psychology and being. This characterisation of jewellery is an attempt to destabilise the effect of normative design objects that propose a distinction between people and our other-than-human enmeshment.

Through the research project, I explore connections between the theory of ontological design and design methodology. ‘Pulling worlds from things’ and ‘pulling things from worlds’ are proposed as concepts for first understanding and then designing the affordances of our environment.