Jewelry and metals associate professor Mary Hallam Pearse is exhibiting work in a solo show titled Matters at Hand at Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee from July 29th through September 18th, 2022. Matters at Hand explores the contradictions between the material world and mortality. See exhibition statement below.

Mary Hallam Pearse received her M.F.A. in Metal from SUNY New Paltz and a B.F.A. in Crafts with an emphasis in Jewelry and Metals from Kent State University. In her ongoing work Mary is interested in how jewelry has functioned historically as a marker of status, class, wealth, and a record of human experience. Her work has been selected for competitive exhibitions in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally and included in publications such as Metalsmith, Ornament and American Craft. Curatorial projects include; Crafting History: Textiles, Metals and Ceramics at the University of Georgia, Parallels: Jonathan Wahl and Sondra Sherman, The Ring Shows: Then & Now and Putting the Band Back Together and Coming into View. She has been invited to present lectures and provide workshops at Penland, Anderson Ranch, Kent State University, East Carolina University and Humboldt State to name a few.  Currently she is Associate Professor in the jewelry and metalwork area at The Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens Georgia.

Matters at Hand

Work by Mary Hallam Pearse

Stove Works | Chattanooga, TN

July 29 - September 18, 2022
Soft Opening: July 29, 2022, 6 - 8 PM

Matters at Hand examines how materials and objects accumulate meaning while expressing paradoxical links between the world brought to us by our senses and our desires, and death. The accumulation of matter plays a role in shaping the work while simultaneously conveying the emptiness of over-consumption and the deep gulf between what is recorded of the past and present experiences. Lead contributes to the making of a number of pieces and brings with it a dark and troubling history. Its properties make the history of its uses manifold and contradictory, as murderous projectile and shield; protecting and destroying, attracting as much as repelling. Flowers and jewelry-symbols of luck and love, markers of mourning, of devotion, of celebration, used to remember, to fill voids, to declare;  together they play a complex role in seduction and desire. In all of the work, the social, political, and personal merge together to explore themes of mortality and the human condition itself.