bio

Kim Nogueira is a contemporary artist/jeweler who received her education apprenticing as a production goldsmith for 16 years. Her BA in sociology from Smith College and deep trance hypnosis training supports the multi-dimensional, thought-based yet intuitively-guided metaphysical explorations that undergird her wearable narrative art practice. Kim's work has been in juried and curated exhibitions both nationally and abroad; notable exhibitions include the Museum of Arts and Design’s MAD about JEWELRY, Le génie des images at LA Joaillerie par Mazlo in Paris, France and the 55th International Enamel Exchange exhibition at the Tokyo Museum of Art. Her solo show Paradox Found was recently shown at Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge MA. Her work has been published in Metalsmith and Art Aurea as well as in more than 15 exhibition catalogues and books, including 1000 Beads, Behind the Brooch, Narrative Jewelry: Tales from the Toolbox and volumes 2 and 3 of the Society of North American Goldsmiths’ annual compendium The Jewelry and Metals Survey. The Morris Museum recently acquired one of her automaton pendants for their permanent collection. Her home base for more than a quarter of a century has been the tiny sub-tropical island of St John, in the US Virgin Islands.

artist statement

In my art jewelry practice, I harness the dual forces of imagery and text from the historical record to intuitively craft a dream-like visual language in glass and metal that embraces the mind and the imagination as a powerful mythopoetic tool for critical thinking, sentience and change, to move us  forward metaphysically on our evolutionary path. The method I work with transforms random imagery and text from the far-to-recent past into miniature multi-nuanced and overlapping frescos of meaning that are made to last lifetimes, and speaks to the collective unconscious realm that we all share. 

…there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and , eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche…wisdom is a return to them.
-C.G. Jung

my story

I have been on a journey of unlearning for several years now. This trek has taken me inward, on a search for the ancient language that connects me to the wind, the ocean, a tortoise and birds, the stars, humanity.  This strange interior pilgrimage included the shedding of layers of learned fear, replaced by the embrace of inter-being, the extraordinary interconnectedness of all things in this universe of marvels and oddities, astonishments and magnificence.

I weave this ethos through my jewelry art using a magpie approach. My intuitively designed and layered narratives in glass and metal extend an invitation to the viewer to become a magician for a moment, an alchemist in reverie, a shaman dreaming a new world. They function as a bridge between the physical, material realm and the invisible, unseen and mysterious territory of the mind. The next iteration of humanity will blossom and metamorphosize in this virtually uncharted interface.

It is a very sacred game we are playing here on earth. Each of my pieces can function as a touchstone, a cairn, a talisman, for soul retrieval, for awakening, for the journey back to remembering. I think of each as a miniature navigational atlas to the unseen, the unheard, the unknown: the world behind this world.