THE INCOMPARABLE MATT SWOPE- JEWELRY BY MATT

 Matt Swope is an Artisan.  The exact definition of this is: A skilled manual worker; a Craftsperson, from the Latin ‘artit’(us), expert in the arts. There could be no better description of Matt’s work.
As a self-taught designer, Matt honed his eye while an art history major at Columbia. He began working in the fashion industry for Comme des garcons and became thoroughly conversant in the tongue of highly modern, inventive fashion designs.  His jewelry line, Jewelry by Matt, gathers inspiration from the natural identity and forms of the objects used, their transformation into jewelry following an organically creative process.  Here is what Matt says:
“ I love simple amuletic pieces that bring to mind nature, as well as other times and cultures. They look best layered and mixed with other pieces of jewelry. They are the kind of pieces that when worn you notice them AND the person who is wearing them. They work well on a strong personality and usually an interesting and artistic one.”
He also wrote: “In an era consumed by the immediacy and crassness of mass production, one-of-a-kind hand made pieces of jewelry guarantees a sense of integrity and depth to one’s self. The hand made object rejects the confines of corporate dictates as it has no exact duplicate and therefore it eliminates any notion of mass produced profit. It categorically denies the motions of modern day commercial manufacturing and it is in a sense a throw back to an earlier epoch. In its own way the hand made one-of-a-kind object is a protest against the dehumanization of mass manufacturing while at the same time it is a validation of the continued relevance of making things by hand”.
What Bunny and I love so much about Matt Swope, is that there is no one else like him.  We truly have never met an artist who uses materials in the ways Matt does, he crafts his jewelry so meticulously by hand and yet has a distinct irreverence for those very same materials. Using constituent elements from super balls to rock crystals, from velvet to leather, the results are always exquisite, creative and totally unexpected.