JEWELRY
OBJECTS
DRAWING
When I first felt my uncle’s bolo tie around my neck, it felt like a costume. There was a gap between my queer body and the image of masculinity that the object conjured. Part of me felt that my Hispanidad was too diluted to be at home in the turquoise stone that I cradled on my chest. Bolo cords lined the borders I put up in myself, but a body of bolos is one of loose joints.
Now, I tug the cords and thresholds askew. I remember and re-limb the bolo.
Inheriting the tropes of Southwestern silversmithing, I reorient the relationship between silver and turquoise– materials extracted from and fetishized within the region. I conglomerate colonial histories and Indigenous Southwestern sentiments. Through scartending, I re-limb disparate fragments of turquoise that embrace ambiguity and artifice as forces that incite border crossing. A liminal yet familiar blue-green centers circulation by recalling water’s cycle of transmutation and inheritance. Born in Utah and raised in Missouri, I draw from memories of turquoise sweat in desert heat and the layer of artifice built through distance. Now, when I long for home, plastic turquoise sends me to the sands of Utah: in part, phony, imposter, and costume, yet stained with the skin of my family’s wear.