Artist Statement

I’m not a dainty jeweler. My rings and necklaces are often designed with a specific purpose or statement in mind as a piece of art displayed upon the wearer rather than an accessory for everyday wear.

My work, like me, is an odd juxtaposition of all the disparate things that interest me in tiny ways I get fixated on. The branches of trees in winter, veins and capillaries, random lines of poetry, the architecture of biological organisms under a microscope, the industrial decay of buildings, history, anthropology, mythology, dinosaurs, and cultural artifacts. I like to explore texture and movement, and also the way that things from completely different places and times and worlds are also similar when looked at in a different way. I like to combine things I know well or transforms them into something that tells a new story about them and gives them a chance to create a new myth, or to highlight the patterns that link them in ways that make the viewer see them in a new light.

I’ve called this collection of my work Biology and Mythology because not only do the individual pieces fit somewhere within at least one of these labels, but because there’s an interesting tension there between the dichotomy of how these two studies shape our understanding of the world and drive who we are culturally in the past and future. Dinosaurs are a perfect example of this tension. We can imagine that early peoples ran across fossils of these extinct creatures and wove their ideas of what these animals were and what happened to them into their mythology and tales.  These fantastical creatures likely seemed the product of a vivid imagination of unsophisticated societies, until fossils were re-discovered matching descriptions. Fueled by the discoveries of modern archaeologists we created our own mythologies of how these creatures looked and lived, which have continued to evolve as scientists learn more about them. 

Artist Bio

Chloe Karr majored in film and animation at Emerson College in Boston, MA. She has a BGS from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with concentrations in Mass Communication, Writer’s Workshop, Studio Art, Philosophy and Biology. She is currently working her way very slowly through the Design Interactivity and Media Arts program at Metropolitan Community College.

She has been in Omaha for 9 years, working as a Voice User Interface designer at West Corporation.

Primarily a stop-motion animator and printmaker, Chloe decided to take Elementary Jewelry Design at MCC on a whim one quarter for a creative outlet and was immediately hooked.  She occasionally sells her pieces on Etsy under the shop Milo and Awasin.