Wearable Art In Jamestown

All jewelry artists must consider the basic geometry of the human body: otherwise we’d all be walking around with bracelets that slide off our wrists and choker necklaces that live up to their name with unfortunate accuracy.

For Jamestown-based jewelry and photographer Didi Suydam, however, designing wearable art means taking into account not just how the piece fits, but how it falls on the body. Suydam likens the process to the challenge a sculptor faces in picking the right site to display his work: “You have to think of the body as a landscape, and your space as the neck and the breastplate,” she says. The design also needs to complement the “movement of the body, the swing of the body,” says Suydam.

The sculpture analogy is apt because Suydam originally wanted to be one; she switched to metalworking and, by extension, jewelry making, for a simple reason: “I loved 3D pieces, but I had no skills,” she recalls. But she was drawn to the art of working with metal, which allowed her to engage in“a very naive kind of engineering” where measurements are all taken by eye, techniques like scoring metal are done by hand, and where she finds satisfaction and calm in the process of drawing concepts, designing pieces, and figuring how to execute them.

Suydam describes her style as “very elemental, simple, distilled down,” and highly influenced by primitive art forms. There are hints of ancient Egypt in some of her more geometric designs, while some metal-and-stone pieces would seem at home around the neck of a Germanic queen. “Historically, jewelry was used to represent your culture, clan or status, so I like the feeling that it’s communicating something – that what I express in my work speaks to the buyer on an absolute level,” she says. “It has to fit the buyer in the right way.”

In addition to wearable art, Suydam exhibits her photography at the Didi Suydam Contemporary Gallery on Ferry Wharf, which also features the work of her sculptor husband, Peter Diepenbrock. Suydam’s images often focus on “forces of nature” but also reflect the artist’s love of architecture, and provide an avenue for her to utilize color palettes typically absent from her jewelry work. Although she considers jewelry her bread and butter, Suydam’s photography is also highly acclaimed, having been featured in a Fall 2012 show at the Newport Art Museum, for example.

The gallery, opened about two years ago in Jamestown, represents a middle ground for the couple, who previously ran busy galleries featuring multiple artists in Newport before deciding to build a studio at home and focus on making art rather than selling the work of others.

“We really love being in Jamestown and in our own community,” says Suydam. “It’s much more personal, and a more natural extension of what we do.” And, while the gallery may never get quite as busy as when it was located on Bannister’s Wharf, “we feel that Jamestown is becoming more of a destination,” she says.

The uncertain economics inherent in the marriage of two artists – particularly a couple with one daughter in college and the other entering in the fall – can sometimes be challenging, but Suydam says she and Diepenbrock “wake up every day feeling grateful.” “That doesn’t mean there’s no stress, but we couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”   Art View 5 Ferry Wharf, Jamestown 575-1214.