About Cat Merrick Jewelry

Cat Merrick deconstructs traditional jewelry themes of light and color with experimental materials like painting pigment and scientific lenses. When jewelry is referred to as sculptural, it is usually in reference to traditional lost wax casting and modeling technique going back to antiquity. Cat doesn't use a single construction technique in common with traditional jewelry and is instead influenced by the experimental optics of contemporary sculptors like Olafur Eliasson. In other words, it is sculptural, but in a contemporary sense. The Monocle collection uses experimental optics to reflect our world and make it strange so that we might see it again with fresh eyes. Some are made with dichroic scientific lenses, once used to look at small things, now intended to shift focus to our environment. Others are experiments with reflection, like a deep mirrored crystal that reflects its own walls or a fresnel lens set over a mirror. This collection is a reminder that the art object isn't important. Art is just a tool to bring the ordinary world around us back into focus. The Pigment collection is a new way of exploring color in jewelry. Art pigments have been refined to a tight family of colors over thousands of years and they are most saturated before binder is added to make paint. Setting pigment directly in glass is intended to display civilization's purest distillation of color in the most vibrant possible way. Winner of the 2021 NYC Design Award for jewelry.Read their story