Artist Statement

"Jewelry-as-art depends as much on function and intimacy as it does on image.  It tends to succeed when designed to be worn by a specific person.  If the work ignores wrists, necks, earlobes, fingers, lapels and is directed instead primarily toward its photographic reproduction in a magazine or its forensic isolation of a museum display case appreciated only as an image or a visual object - it risks losing its identity: as adornment.  Intentionally denied this purpose, jewelry becomes, ironically,  a kind of performance art.

At the workbench, an intimate dialogue develops between artist and material.  In the journey from the artist's mind to the forge to the wearer, an unique alchemy takes place in which the creation of art and the wearing of it become one and the same."

Carolyn Morris Bach: Artist's Statement.
 Portfolio, American Craft February/March, 1989

Every piece of jewelry that leaves the studio is entirely hand-fabricated by me; I do not employ any studio assistants. I perform all processes - from designing to stone cutting and setting to packaging.  While l incorporate some commercially made findings because I consider them generally well-made and innocuous to my design; I do not use cast or pre-made parts. While I strive for perfection in my design and craftsmanship, I am not overly concerned that every form requires perfectly rounded edges or that every element be an exact replication of its counterpart. If this is art, it should be individual and unique and preserve for the viewer deliberate traces of the decisions for fabrication: the passage of the hands through materials.  I believe that the making of art-jewelry and the wearing of art-jewelry should be either closely allied or one and the same thing.