bloodgantetheart
collection of Donna Schneier /
bleedingheart
collection of Allen and Irene Natow / Both photos Kevin Sprague.
And then, one day she fell in love with “romance.” She was fin-
ishing an exercise in a wax-carving class and realized she was taken
with the “big juicy cleave” of the heart she had just carved. A hip-hop
fan, Brooks humorously drew a parallel to jLo’s butt. She remains
smitten, and since 2008, the tropes of love in their most obvious
forms have overrun her work. There are roses on hearts, bows on
hearts, hearts on hearts. Fragonard would be proud. In Sentimental
Foolery, her latest series, blood-red garnets set in heart-shaped be-
zels dangle from heart-shaped brooches. Even the reviled bubblegum
pink has crept into her aesthetic, in pink vintage rhinestones and
erotic bows coated in Pepto-Bismol enamel. “Even though [they]
are like empty shells, I think there’s always tasty cream to suck
from them,” she told me.
An associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design,
Brooks is represented by Sienna Gallery in Lenox, M A, and her
work is in the collection of both the Museum of Arts and Design
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like many of her contempo-
raries, she has established a practice based on a postmodern concern
with history and a poetic inversion of jewelry’s hierarchies. Her
earliest pieces were explorations of mimesis and surrogacy: cutting
steel to look like the shadowy mirror-images of precious stones or
pitting massive inexpensive crystals against tiny diamonds to see
who “came out on top.” An admirer of Berlin iron jewelry, which
citizens of that city received from the government when they con-
tributed their gold and silver to fund the war against Napoleon,
Brooks in her own work similarly honored the valueless. She treated
utilitarian materials with the reverence of a goldsmith, fusing ma-
chismo metal like stainless steel into delicate filigrees, while the
solder, usually the glue invisible in the spectacle of bijouterie, was
often the costliest element in a piece.
Down to its molecular composition, Brooks’s jewelry is a rigor-
ous critique of tradition. And yet she engages the pomp that many
contemporary jewelers dare not indulge. Take
cut steel brooch (belly),
2004, of stainless steel: readable as a sort of methadone therapy
for diamond lust, this extravagant clump of steel might be just as in-
toxicating. Beyond parody and pastiche, it seems that Brooks has
peered so deep into the looking glass that she’s fallen through to the
other side. For a 2008 brooch she chose jet as the main material, a>
Above:
discoboli brooch,
2004,
stainless steel,
champagne rosc-cut
diamonds, 18k gold,
9/io x
Vs
x •% in.
Right:
bloadgarnetheart,
2004,
brooch, stainless steel,
vintage rosc-cut garnets,
14k gold, 4 x 3% x iVS in.
Opposite:
cut steel brooch (belly),
2004, stainless steel,
18k gold solder,
1
Vs x
1
V
5
x
"/10
in.
Above:
bleedingheart,
2009,
brooch, stainless steel,
vintage rose-cut garnets,
14kgold,4X 3V4X
1V2
in.
fcb/mar
10 american craft 055
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