( The Family Bracelet )

“For my twenty-first birthday, my loved ones gifted me a coupon to follow an all-inclusive jewelry workshop where I could create something designed by myself. This was an opportunity not to be taken lightly. It must have taken me at least three months before I came up with a design. It was right before my eyes all this time: a photo of my mother, me, my brother and my father, one of the only ones of the four of us together.”

When I was one-and-a-half years old my mother died of cancer. I never really got to know her, but in my daily life I like to look for ways to remember her and also to appreciate my father, who – although with a lot of help from other invaluable people around us – did a great job at being a dad and a mom rolled into one.

I used the outlines of the family photo as a starting point to create the negative spaces in a simple bar of silver, that was later shaped to fit my wrist. Even though the bracelet was most likely expensive, the sentimental value of it can not be expressed in numbers.

( Rachel )
( Belgium )