A garden is more than a place. It is a way of thinking, a proposition about how we might coexist with the natural world. Simultaneously cultivated and wild, a garden exists in the paradox of time: shaped by human hands, yet resistant to control; fleeting, yet eternal in its seasonal return. GARDEN gathers the work of twenty-two contemporary artists who engage nature not as passive subject, but as collaborator. Across their practices, the botanical and the bodily are inextricably linked—each piece a record of attention, transformation, and care. 

Nature, in these works, is not scenic. It is intimate. Hair, wing, bark, bone: materials that speak in a minor key, yet resonate with deep emotional force. These are not decorative gestures, but acts of embodiment— ways of holding onto the ephemeral, the erotic, the unsettling. Here, jewelry operates not as accessory, but as argument. To adorn the body with nature is to engage its contradictions: permanence and fragility, beauty and decay, memory and forgetting. Throughout history, artists and makers have turned to nature not simply for inspiration, but for meaning. The earliest jewelry—shells, seeds, bones—was symbolic as much as ornamental. In ancient Greece, laurel wreaths spoke of civic triumph; in Victorian England, jet mourning jewelry sealed fragments of flora beneath glass. Such objects served as emblems, not just of style, but of sentiment. The artists in GARDEN work within this long lineage. Yet rather than imitating natural forms, they interrogate them, treating nature as muse, as material, and as method. 

Take Gabriella Kiss, whose Hudson Valley studio might be mistaken for a naturalist’s laboratory. Her gold renderings of seedpods, beetle legs, and antlers are precise but never clinical. Each object is the result of prolonged observation, transformed by hand into a study in devotion. If taxonomy begins with naming, Kiss begins with noticing. Her jewelry reflects a world seen closely and with care—where smallness is not a lack, but a virtue. In contrast, 

Jamie Bennett’s enamels trade in abstraction. He has spent decades expanding the expressive vocabulary of the medium, moving beyond its historical association with surface embellishment. In his hands, enamel becomes atmospheric: pigment and petal dissolve into weather-like fields of color. These brooches do not depict flowers, but evoke them—refracting memory through hue, edge, and opacity. If Kiss offers clarity, Bennett gives us the blur. 

Working in Philadelphia, Melanie Bilenker renders the domestic into the devotional. Using her own hair as drawing material, she captures moments of daily intimacy—brushing, reading, pausing. The resulting scenes are sealed beneath glass, framed in gold, and worn close to the body. Like 19th-century hairwork, her jewelry makes the private visible, transforming ordinary gestures into relics. But Bilenker does not mine the past for nostalgia. Rather, she reclaims it—threading personal history into a larger conversation about presence, labor, and loss. 

Anna Ágnes Bánkuti, trained in Germany and working between disciplines, treats the body not only as a site for adornment but as a space for drawing. Her work begins with illustration—botanical forms rendered by hand—which she then transposes onto translucent plastic, hand-cut and heat-formed into ethereal compositions. These are not traditional floral motifs. They resemble specimens from a speculative archive—fossils of a future flora, fragile yet composed, suggesting both temporality and preservation. In this, Bánkuti is emblematic of a broader trend within the exhibition: a synthesis of craft technique and conceptual inquiry. 

The sculptural adornments of Sulo Bee take this synthesis in a very different direction. Based in Central Texas, Bee constructs queer ecologies—wearable artifacts drawn from speculative mythologies. Their process is resolutely hybrid: electroforming, glitter, bone, resin, and abject materials collide in assemblages that shimmer with defiance. Bee’s jewelry is not meant to comfort; it is an act of world-building. As a co-founder of Queer Metalsmiths, they center identity, resistance, and ornamentation as tools of survival and transformation. Here, nature is not a stable referent but a mutable terrain—rewilded through imagination. Sia Taylor’s work, by contrast, operates in the register of restraint. Her hand-wrought elements in gold and silver—barely larger than seeds or rain—fall in rhythmic sequences. They suggest grasses, breath, the hum of insect wings. In Taylor’s jewelry, repetition becomes a mode of meditation, and scale a tool for intimacy. Mirei Takeuchi’s pieces, produced in Tokyo, are similarly minimal but more industrial in tone. She laser-cuts iron and steel into gestures that evoke the wings of dragonflies or husk forms that balance delicacy and structure, evanescence and weight. Hiyu Hamasaki explores related territory through colored plastic, crafting cross-sections of imagined flowers with an almost anatomical clarity. These works flirt with artificiality, but always return to organic rhythm. 

In the UK, Christopher Thompson Royds brings an archival sensibility to flora. His pieces echo the logic of the herbarium: golden daisies and botanicals pressed into permanence. They speak not just to what blooms, but to what is preserved. Royds’s jewelry captures the moment between life and memory, between picking and pinning—a meditation on fragility, yes, but also on devotion. The botanical, here, is both object and offering. 

Märta Mattsson, based in Stockholm, turns to the natural world’s discarded fragments: insect husks, wings, carapaces. Preserved in resin and coated with crushed stones or pigments, they glitter with an unsettling beauty. Her brooches disturb as much as they delight, pushing back against conventional hierarchies of value. In Mattsson’s hands, decay becomes spectacle. Trained in Japan, the UK, and Sweden, she draws on a global vocabulary to question the boundaries between attraction and repulsion, between preciousness and revulsion. Hers is a practice rooted in contradiction—a jewelry of paradox and provocation. 

The Berkshires' own Tim McClelland brings a classical sensibility to the botanical. With decades of traditional training, he crafts brooches and earrings in gold and platinum that recall 19th-century refinement. Yet his work resists pastiche. Instead, it is disciplined and contemporary—an homage to nature through precision, grace, and restraint. If McClelland offers refinement, Suzanne Pugh offers resolve. Her silver cup, forged with the texture of tree bark, is stark in its clarity. There is no florid gesture here, no flourish. It is a vessel of presence—weighty, silent, and deliberate. Sharon Church’s work, too, inhabits this register of spiritual materialism. A transformative figure in American studio jewelry, Church carved wood and stone into forms that pulse with animacy. Her Scepter—crafted in boxwood and crowned with garnets—is both botanical and symbolic, a staff of intimate power. It reminds us that adornment has always served multiple functions: ornament, yes, but also ritual, protection, and inheritance. 

Bettina Speckner’s brooches operate at the intersection of photography and memory. Using antique tintypes, photo-etched zinc, and enamel, she creates works that feel like materialized atmosphere. A shadow, a leaf, the edge of a horizon: her motifs are almost incidental. Based in Germany, Speckner uses jewelry not to frame the image, but to transform it—converting the photograph into an artifact, a locus of touch and remembrance. Her jewelry doesn’t illustrate nature; it evokes its traces. 

The New York and Berkshires-based goldsmith Taryn Leavit embraces asymmetry and hand-wrought imperfection. She alloys her own gold, working intuitively to form pieces that resemble relics—objects excavated rather than designed. These are not polished statements but tactile meditations. They speak of tools, talismans, and unspoken histories, their surfaces marked by time and process. Leavitt’s work holds space for the incomplete—for forms that suggest, rather than declare. 

In Colombia, Xandra Uribe casts heirloom beans in gold, stringing them on cúmara fiber harvested by Indigenous communities. Drawing from her Latin American heritage, she infuses each piece with ancestral knowledge. These are not mere adornments—they are offerings. Nourishment, remembrance, resistance: Uribe’s jewelry operates within a matrix of cultural continuity. Similarly, Daniel Kruger’s practice defies categorization. A South African artist based in Munich, Kruger works across materials— porcelain, textile, metal—drawing from global ornament histories. His jewelry is exuberant, sensuous, and hybrid. It resists the reduction of tradition into type. Instead, it revels in multiplicity. 

California based Sondra Sherman’s brooches feel like specimens—pressed artifacts from a personal archive. Drawing on literature, science, and lived experience, she constructs wearable studies in memory. Her work, like much in this exhibition, is as conceptual as it is material. The same might be said of the late Lucy Sarneel, whose zinc-based compositions evoked Dutch folk tradition and domestic ritual. She worked not to depict nature, but to conjure it, to suggest its presence through gesture, structure, and care. Georgina Treviño offers a sharp rejoinder to adornment’s colonial entanglements. Her reimagining of the Maquech beetle, a living ornament historically worn in the Yucatán, renders the creature in chain, crystal, and metal. Radiant, yes, but also unsettling. Based in San Diego and raised on the border, Treviño interrogates glamour as a site of power and performance. Her jewelry is political, self-aware, and unapologetically seductive. Also in San Diego, Leslie Shershow’s So Many Wishes begins with the suggestion of a dandelion, then fractures it into a geometry of shimmer. Her work resists nostalgia, even as it engages with its emotional residue. A wish becomes a structure. Sentiment is made architectural. Shershow’s brooches are crystalline thoughts, each one a facet of longing, refracted and reframed. 

To walk through GARDEN is to enter a space where jewelry becomes a method of inquiry—a way of thinking through the hand, across time, and in communion with the natural world. This is not a taxonomic survey. It is a living archive: associative, layered, unresolved. These artists do not mimic nature. They reckon with it. They engage its complexity, its temporality, and its politics. 

To make jewelry is to honor what passes. To wear it is to keep meaning close. And to behold it— especially here—is to encounter the possibility that even the smallest form might contain a universe: radiant, feral, and still unfolding.