Caroline Mesquita, Bague grenouille

Large black boxes, like jewel cases, display treasures of uncertain origin. Jewelry? Amulets from another time? Inside these protective boxes, we find rings, adorned with human figures, birds, felines, but also strange creatures. Frozen in a moment of action, these objects seem to wait for us to pick them up so they can come alive and draw us into their silent stories.
To create these jewelry-sculptures, Caroline Mesquita trades the large brass sheet for wax, sculpted and then entrusted to a Marseille foundry to be cast using the lost-wax technique. Her familiar gestures—folding, rolling, deforming—are all there, but at an intimate scale, with a level of detail that is striking.