JESS TODD STUDIO

Breana Ferrara | Artist Statement

In making, Breana Ferrara’s interest lies in forms and subjects that society condemns as taboo or unsettling, while simultaneously obsessing over and indulging in those same things. Sagging, corpulent, oozing, excessive forms have always served as her fascination and inspiration. The jewelry and adornment she creates is intended to feel raw, stimulating, and vulnerable to the wearer’s senses. She makes experiences laden with sensual and tactile pleasure and explores the line between titillating and unnerving, beautiful and unsightly, delicious and disgusting. Her methodology is present in acts of image collecting, reflective writing, and preposterously time-consuming processes. 

Ferrara’s adornment is a means of unapologetic being and rebelling against a culture that deems pleasures as “guilty” and being yourself as being “too much.” It is loud and vulnerable without fear or embarrassment. Her work appreciates the absolute pleasure in excessiveness and indulgence, because she finds joy and belonging in excessive process and form. The work she creates is an act of being noticed, of being “too much,” of being emotional, and through it all – having an innate sense of humor and humanity. 

In her recent work, Ferrara explores her own humanity and emotions through anthropomorphic forms resembling familiar animals, but abstracted and perverted into creatures that border on fantastical and cryptozoological. Her series Birthing Purses is inspired by one of her favorite childhood toys – a stuffed elephant that would "birth" miniature elephants through a velcro belly pouch. She is fascinated by the absurd sterility of neatly tearing open the velcro to reveal the babies, and its contrast to the complicated, difficult, and complex feelings she’s developed toward the idea of pregnancy and parenthood.

Drawing on her simpler childhood feelings, Ferrara used the "puffy" fabric paint of nostalgic childhood crafting, combined with her favorite medium nowadays… lots and lots of beads! Playing with exaggerated scale and weight in the purses, she aims to elicit the feeling of being young and small, experiencing feelings more neatly, innocently, and naively. 

For Ferrara, the purse is a metaphor for the stereotype of the very binary, cisgender idea of womanhood that she grew up with – the patriarchal and sometimes biologically-induced sentiment that a fulfilling, meaningful life comes from experiencing being a parent. In these pieces she expresses the complex and contradictory realities that she holds true within herself – her own sentimental but skeptical feelings that she holds toward making the decision to mother children (or not) in her future. 

Breana Ferrara is a jeweler, metalsmith, and maker of excessive body adornment at her home studio in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts 3D with a concentration in Jewelry/Metalsmithing from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, where she was nominated for the Windgate Fellowship in 2017. Recently, she was accepted into New York Jewelry Week’s One for the Future program.

Instagram @corpulence_drip