Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Jewelry and Metalsmithing
First Advisor
Lauren Fensterstock
Second Advisor
Timothy Veske-McMahon
Third Advisor
Angus Lockyer
Abstract
Memory rarely returns whole. More often, it persists through fragments, sensations, and traces carried by the body. This thesis explores how jewelry can materialize the unstable relationship between memory, forgetting, and bodily experience. Drawing from personal experiences of family, migration, and loss—particularly witnessing my grandfather’s gradual memory deterioration through Alzheimer’s disease—I reconsider forgetting not as absence, but as a condition through which emotional traces continue to persist.
Through fabric, fragmented photographs, and processes of fraying and dispersal, my work examines how memories are continuously reconstructed. Influenced by the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai (negative space) — I investigate how incompleteness can create room for viewers’ imagination, allowing their own experiences to enter.
Rather than treating jewelry as a permanent object, I approach it as a bodily and temporal experience that changes through touch, movement, and wear. Threads loosen, images blur, and fragments detach over time. As the work continues to shift through making and wearing, what disappears becomes part of the work, just as forgetting becomes part of memory.
Recommended Citation
Yang, Alees, "Forgotten Threads: The Embodiment of Time and Memory in Jewelry." (2026). Masters Theses. 1551.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1551
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.