Sisterhood Bodies in Proximity

Luci Jockel and Emily Jockel first shared a bedroom in their family’s home in western Pennsylvania. Now, for NYC Jewelry Week 2021, they present a joint exhibition, Sisterhood: Bodies in Proximity, representing a shared creative inquiry born in sisterhood.

Raised by antique dealers, the importance of objecthood and object history was a given in childhood, and later would inform the sisters’ separate but parallel paths to object-making. This exhibition looks into how these paths align and intersect. It explores how the works create a dialogue not only between sisters, but about the interaction between body and object, body and second skin, and therefore, the dynamic between two forces. Questions are raised of nature vs. nurture, chicken vs. egg, and body vs. object. When two forces interplay, which is the affecting force and which is affected?

Sisterhood: Bodies in Proximity is an exchange between body (clay) and a second skin (adornment), self and other, through the dynamic of a sisterhood. How does One behave in the company of an Other? How does one Body affect an Other, reveal about an Other? This inquiry has much precedent: in architecture, a building’s facade ornament might betray its interior; in fashion, a bias-cut garment might enhance the wearer’s waist; in the arachnid world, an Orb-weaver spider decorates its spiral web with shimmering ultraviolet ornaments to lure bees, transforming the web-object into an iridescent beacon. Whether the nature of any given pairing is enhancement, revelation, deception or growth, there is power in the proximity of discrete objects.

Sisterhood has a particular force of its own. The paired pieces of this exhibition are tests in adjacency, juxtapositions intuited by two women who have known one another intimately for thirty years, who have commonality, history. Similarly in astrophysics, new research suggests the current nature of black hole pairings might reveal the history of the stars which formed them…

“Aside from mass and charge, the only trait a black hole can have is spin—a measure of how quickly it rotates. If a pair of black holes, and the stars from which they form, live their whole lives together, the constant push and pull will align their spins. But if two black holes happen to encounter each other later in life, their spins will likely be unequal.” – Quanta Magazine, 2021

We suspect our proximity as sisters influences the nature of our work, and here we test not only what force might emerge from this interplay, but the nature of its spin.

Join us Friday, November 19th at 6:00pm in The Great Room @ The Jewelry Library for Cocktails, Conversations, and Collaborations: An Evening with Gallery Loupe, featuring the Jockel sisters. RSVP Here.

Then, stop by TJL Saturday morning, November 20th, for Breakfast at The Jewelry Library: Coffee, Croissants, and Gallery Talks with Lucy and Emily, as well as Aida Sulova from News from Central Asia. RSVP Here.