IAN HENDERSON JEWELRY Artist

Ian Henderson grew up on a series of military bases around Europe, moving every few years as his father’s employment demanded. The bulk of those years were spent in Germany, where he attended an international school. It was in this diverse environment, surrounded by a broad range of nationalities and cultural backgrounds, however,  Ian failed to develop a normal sense of us, them, and other.

Unable to reconcile concepts such as social hierarchies, cruelty, or even sarcasm, Ian’s Americanization was swift and brutal. He emerged from adolescence with a distrust of groups, a passion for the obscure, and an enduring inability to differentiate the novel from the obvious. It is these traits that pushed him out of the Midwest and towards America’s eastern coastline.

After attending the Rhode Island School of Design and later MassArt in Boston, he waved on the precipice between calculated eccentricity and heroic perversion. His work represents an attempt to treat nebulous, passing, vision as Platonic Ideal. He brings it into manifestation through fierce application of technical virtuosity.

Currently, Ian maintains a studio in Waltham and occasionally teaches classes in silver casting and metalsmithing at various craft schools throughout Massachusetts.

About the Art

Inside all of us there are flickering moments folding into themselves. My task is to see them, hold them in mind, and take them seriously long enough that they can become tangible.

The images on this site are part of a body of work that uses shapes inspired by animal forms to explore the relationship between jewelry as signifiers of wealth, social status, or sexual attractiveness; and the animal plumes, crests, horns, and tails which serve similar functions in their respective kingdoms.

In these works, I have attempted to generate a tension between attraction and repulsion, the seductive and the dangerous. The objects are graceful, elegant, and constructed from exalted materials like gold and silver. They terminate into spines, blades, and interlocking plates of armor. In this way they ask to be touched, but warn us to do so cautiously.

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