Ashley Buchanan

Ashley Buchanan is a jewelry artist who received her BFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing from the University of Georgia and is currently making her living as a studio jeweler in Johnson City, Tennessee. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums Velvet da Vinci, The Racine Art Museum and the Museum of Art and Design in New York.

"My work focuses on image, pattern and decoration in order to reference ornamentation and historical jewelry. As a maker, it is my intention to challenge the conventions of handmade jewelry through the use of inexpensive materials and new approaches to design and surface decoration. I am interested in a reality that exists through images and representations and how the appearance of an object can substitute for the original. Utilizing silhouettes allows me to reduce these images down to their most basic form and reference the history of jewelry with a clean, contemporary aesthetic. This is reinforced through the use of powder coating, a process commonly used on an industrial scale to coat or color large metal objects with a durable, uniform finish. By using a limited color palette of black, white, greys and the occasional pop of yellow, I am able to allude to common colors of metal such as silver, gold and oxidized metal The use of repeated iconic imagery has proved to be very important to my work and in my most recent pieces, I have been exaggerating simple motifs such as teardrops, ovals and chain links while including hints of decoration in order to create pieces that are less recognizable than traditional silhouettes but maintain a familiar identity between the viewer/wearer and the object."

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