About Me
Many cultures have kept deceased family and community members as part of the community through rituals, body displays and skeletal ossuaries. This has gone on since the dawn of civilization. Death has never been taboo for me....I find beauty in odd things and bone in particular is something that speaks to me. The natural world is something of wonder and skeletons are something that has drawn me into the weird world of collecting. This fascination and desire to collect turned into my source of income as well when my trades of Jewelry making and collecting began to collide! I have been making jewelry since 1999 and began incorporating natural items from very early on.
The pieces I make containing human skull bone are from a very specific and narrow niche. I have come across skulls over the years that have been grossly mistreated and damaged, whether it be from accidental drops, occult type ceremony or even malicious intent. These pieces are sometimes very old or some are new and vary in history from museum or private collections to medical schools or colleges and high school science classes and they always made me sad for the destruction of a wonderful thing and for the disrespect of the person it once was. While bone is simply a shell of a human and not the person themselves, I feel they still deserve respect for who they once were. I spent a long time thinking about what could be done with these skulls that are damaged; they are really no longer good for medical study and they don't have an aesthetic appeal for display. They don't display well, you can't really study much from them and they are no good to science, but they still have an intrinsic and human value. I finally got the nerve to try my idea of cutting one up to extract some parts from it and try making fine jewelry.....i was very pleased with the result for a couple of reasons: First, it came out really nice and had a great aesthetic feel....secondly I felt that I had found a way to take this neglected and broken skull and give it back respect. By turning it into jewelry the skull instantly becomes more than it was. It will be purchased by the type of person who inherently will appreciate, want, properly care for and even pass it on later to another proper caretaker for it. This forgotten fragment of a human gets back the respect we all deserve in death. Thats where my name "Death Isn't The End" comes from....be it specifically the transformation of trash to treasure or just a general term, death isn't the end.