JORGE MANILLA

We humans usually run away from confronting our darkest fears and feelings. It is my aim to dis-cuss them and, through my jewellery pieces, give others an opportunity to do the same. My series Decomposition Dreams represents the vulnerability of the human body in its raw beauty. For this collection, I used tree bark as the main material. Bark covers and protects the tree and meanwhile it absorbs, transforms and preserves the marks of time in scars, beautiful and painful at the same time. To give it a new meaning, I transform the bark. By hammering it, tearing it and vaporizing it, I create a new kind of skin, and then use small fragments of it in my work. The fragmented pieces of bark, turned into small objects, show the intimate things that happen to a body during life.

I want to invite people to think about existential matters; about the thin line between growth and decay and the fragility of the human state of mind. My representations of pain and happiness em-phasize what it means to exist, expressed very clearly 'in the flesh'.

Jorge Manilla