Dude, Where’s My Carapace? Ian Henderson Finds Jewelry-Making Inspiration in the Exoskeletal

The following article is from the official Crafty Bastards Events Guide which you can pick up in this week’s Washington City Paper on stands now.

By Garth Johnson

Ian Henderson makes jewelry inspired by nature. But that doesn’t mean he has a thing for sweet little flowers, leaves, or birds. Instead, the 31-year-old Bostonian says, “The insect world, the deep-under-sea-plant world, the world of things underground, under rocks, or in holes are an inspiration to me. The other thing that I’m attracted to are…claws, spines, stingers, fangs, and myriad other natural armaments that appear…on creatures in hidden and hard-to-reach places.”

His Zoa Chimerum line is a veritable natural history museum of defensive forms, bristling with overlapping spikes. But surfaces that at first glance seem hard, unyielding, and threatening are actually soft, pliable, and inviting. Henderson’s materials of choice are silicone insulation tubing and aluminum grounding wire, both repurposed from the electronics industry. They’re things that “are hardly ever used like this,” he says—but also things you can buy at the hardware store.

Discovering the hidden potential of the commonplace is something Henderson has always done. As an Army brat he “spent a lot of time lifting up rocks while…running around in the German countryside” before his family settled in Overland Park, Kan. He moved east to study metalsmithing at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, then found employment as a sign fabricator, blacksmith, and flute maker. In 2009 a studiomate gave him some insulation tubing she’d never quite gotten around to experimenting with. Henderson had made some spiky, carapace-inspired pieces in college, but they were metal—and too dangerous, really, to wear as jewelry. Here, he discovered, was a material that could hold similar shapes without harming either wearer or bystander.

His Zoa Chimerum work is made from layering carefully shaped segments of tubing over wire armatures. A simple ring takes perhaps 30 minutes to make. An elaborate necklace might take as long as several days. But Henderson loves getting lost in the process. “I’m drawn to plant and insect forms because so much of their structure consists of stacked, repeated shapes that transform with each iteration,” he says. “When I use processes that borrow from nature’s logic, it feels like I’m somehow living inside of a growing thing.

“The only problem with this system,” he adds, “is that when I create something I really, really like, I have to reverse-engineer my own work just to figure out how to make it again.”

Via an audio file made during a soak in the tub—as well as a few ordinary emails—Henderson talks about organic design, natural poisons, and Lady Gaga.

What was the “aha!” moment that made you want to make jewelry? The closest thing I had to an aha! moment was actually when I took a jewelry class on a whim. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design summer program when I was a junior in high school, and in that program you could pick classes that were like preparation for real classes at the college…I was interested in learning something I wouldn’t be able to do in school with metal, gas torches, acids, and other things that you can’t really have in a high school environment—or at least not my high school.

You use repurposed materials. How important is that to the story of your jewelry? There’s a current in the craft world of taking objects people recognize and using them to make an art object that people also recognize—for example, making a bust of somebody out of pennies or a bull out of Red Bull cans. I feel like a lot of what happens with the emphasis on reclaimed materials is that becomes the whole story. I use the materials that I do because they have properties that I like. I use them because, as near as I can tell, I find them enjoyable to work with, and they are the best materials I know of right now for expressing the gestures that I want to express.

How do you go about planning and constructing your pieces? Each spine or curl is cut one piece at a time and layered onto a forged aluminum armature. The size, angle, and degree of overlap in the components is determined by eye and my own sense of visual harmony. Each segment in the sequence is a response to all of the segments that have preceded it. In this way the design process and the crafting of the object are happening simultaneously…Rather than planning a design out, I prefer to plan out a very specific process and allow the final designs to emerge intuitively from subtle and gradual changes in a simple, repeated step.

Are there details of your work that casual viewers might miss? The tactile quality. Most casual viewers do not pick up my jewelry unless I invite them to, because the pieces appear delicate and sharp. When they give in to my insistence and touch them, however, they discover that they are actually quite durable and soft. They are delighted to run their fingers along the flexible spines and feel them spring back into place…Visually, the details create the rhythm in the pieces, so while they are individually unremarkable, their relationship to one another is very important. In that way, the viewer might not notice all of the individual elements, but rather the way they harmonize with one another.

What can you tell us about the line between beauty and danger that your work explores? It’s interesting that the things we are traditionally repulsed by, when viewed in great detail, have elements within them that to most eyes are extremely beautiful—for example, the compound eye of a butterfly, the delicate veining of a dragonfly’s wings, the curvature and fractal rhythms of an uncoiling fern. There’s a certain beauty in them, and I’m fascinated by the fact that these tiny, delicate things often have poisons, weaponry, or other offensive/defensive weapons that are disproportionately severe to the scale of the animal or plant. These are tiny, fragile things that are extremely vulnerable and can be destroyed almost unconsciously by the more lumbering, overt creatures of the earth. The only way for these delicate things to have any right to exist in this world is by being deadly to the larger creatures that live around them.

What’s next? How would you like your work to evolve? I would like to see the work evolve outward beyond the confines of jewelry. My area of interest is really the whole realm of human adornment, the interaction with the human body, and the concept of human beauty. I’d like to find a place where explorations in that direction can find a home. The only area I feel like that type of exploration has any room to grow is the world of high fashion. If anything, I would like to get my work in front of the fashion world.

Are there any fashion designers you’d especially like to work with? The obvious choice would be someone like Alexander McQueen, if he were still alive, because rhythm, pattern, and biomimicry were always so central to his work, as were the themes of beauty/threat and attraction/repulsion. That said, much of the work I most admire in his collections was made—and, for all intents and purposes, designed—by other people. So I’d love to work alongside people…[who] made substantial contributions to the McQueen aesthetic.

The other semi-obvious choice, because people mention this to me all the time, would be the designers responsible for dressing Lady Gaga. Not all of it is to my taste, but a lot of it is consistent with my sensibilities.

All images courtesy of the Crafty Bastards Vendor Gallery.