These various pieces of jewelry by Bryan Parnham are made in engraved sterling silver. The process of creating silver images in this way is a technique of his own invention, adapting several pre-existing industrial methods for studio use.
This continuing body of work is a by-product of educating himself in photography. More specifically, these pieces are, in part, reactionnaty to ideas of photographic theory written by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin and James Elkins.
Barthes describes the interpretation of a photograph in terms of “Studium”, the interest of the photo in relation to the culture of the viewer, and “Punctum”, the impregnable element that touches the viewer.
In many of these pieces, he experimentally presents the “punctum” dissociated from the “studium”. He offers a small detail, here in the form of a piece of jewelry, without the larger context of a photograph. Once the “punctum” has been worn, the context becomes the wearer. The wearer then becomes their own “studium”, their own intentional context.
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