Dead Hearts is a jewelry collection inspired by pieces from both the contemporary and Victorian era. I create ceramic jewelry with bones, skulls, and other memento mori to highlight the beauty of a natural death and burial. Small, intimate pieces are meant to be carried and worn throughout the day, serving the same purpose as memento mori jewelry from the Victorian era - to be a constant reminder of death.

Our modern attitude towards death is more distant than it ever has been. For many centuries, grief was very public and funerary practices had the family involved in preparing the body and carrying out the actual funeral. Today, we are expected to keep grieving short and outsource the funeral to others. This has led to death denial becoming the norm in our society and affecting how we treat the dead. We try all we can to keep the deceased from decaying, using everything from embalming to rubber sealed and double lines caskets. Through this attempt to avoid the natural and inevitable, we damage the living world by burying roughly 5.3 million gallons of formaldehyde per year in the U.S. alone.

Through Dead Hearts, my goal is to normalize the topic of death through personal and beautiful pieces, making it easier to talk about the problems in our modern funeral industry and what we can do to begin to fix it.