Hannah Oatman
Hannah Oatman's work is born from an interest in how consumerism and marketing blur the line between art and product. Hannah fell in love with Jewelry while attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and completed her BFA at SUNY New Paltz in 2017. In the year following, she completed residencies at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Smitten Forum, and Baltimore Jewelry Center, and won the inaugural Jewelry Edition Award. She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. She has exhibited in various national and international exhibitions, including Talente 2019 in Munich and a solo exhibition at the Hannah Gallery in Barcelona in 2021. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Enamel Arts Foundation.
The Line is a series of exaggerated contemporary jewelry “products” that engage the audience through collecting, marketing, and nostalgia. It grew from a dissatisfaction with the world of “contemporary jewelry,” or “art jewelry,” or “author jewelry,” or whatever people are calling the field now (assuming they’re calling it anything).
The Line pushes against the rarely questioned conventions of contemporary jewelry by playing along with them (sometimes even playing a little rough).
This work intentionally walks on the lines between jewelry and art, and between art and product: lines that exist whether we want them to or not, but which can and should be blurred if contemporary jewelry is to break out of the liminal space it exists in now.