Defining a Style

I have been challenged in recent weeks about the style of jewelry that I create using vintage and antique hardware, salvaged scraps of costume jewelry and found objects.

"Is this Steampunk?"

"You don't look like a Steampunk kind of person."

"What do you call this?"

It is time to define my style.

Steampunk is an amazing marriage of technology and fantasy. Here you will find hot air balloons, trains, and dirigibles. There are world travelers and time travelers. There are fanciful machines and the inventors that imagined them. It is all topped off with costuming that finds its roots in the romantic Victorian era and is influenced by the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines with their gears and bright brass tubes feature prominently.

Picture Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, old episodes of the TV series Wild, Wild West and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. My favorite current example is SyFy's original series Warehouse 13.

Steampunk is fashion, fiction, fantasy and to some a cultural lifestyle.

Steampunk fashion accessories have function. Goggles, magnifiers, communicators, compasses and time travel devices are created with imagination and flair.

My jewelry uses tiny pieces of machinery made possible by the Industrial revolution. Watch gears, plumbing fixtures, clock parts, wire bushings, and machined cabinet hardware are combined with mid 20Th century costume jewelry, brass wire and Victorian findings to create a wearable collage.

These pieces are put together with an eye to their intrinsic beauty. They are not meant to function as anything other than art and ornament. It gives me great pleasure to salvage these bits of our past, to repurpose and recycle them. Their beauty should not be wasted. I call my work Salvaged Style, made from little bits of history.

Steampunk?

Yes, and so much more.