Dear Diary: Aran Galligan
Seattle is home to a thriving metals community that encompasses not only metal sculpture, but a wide range of art jewelry and craft-based artists. Among them is Aran Galligan — a talented metalsmith with both technical mastery and conceptual depth, who also serves as an educator and facilitator through her work with the Seattle Metals Guild.
Galligan’s art explores systems, both man-made and within the human body, investigating the similarities and the fascinating intersections between the two. Her belief is that “through wearing, the jewelry is activated, creating parallels with the body while also working incongruously with the body — encircling it but not intersecting it.”
Her work often resembles bodily organs, tissues, and cells, pairing these organic shapes with the hard lines of constructed objects and hardware. The result is wearable sculpture that reads as simultaneously hard and soft, tender and bold — statement jewelry that makes the observer conscious of their own living body and its many intricacies.
Galligan’s work was on view at Seattle Pacific University in the SPAC Gallery, where collector Bob Corson paired his collection of historic plique-à-jour jewelry with his acquisitions from Galligan — an exhibit that tied together the metalworkers’ art of past and present.
A day in the studio:
None of these work.
Function follows form.
Some of the studio buddies.
Another studio buddy — still super bummed about getting decapitated.
Third time’s the charm.
Getting ready to solder it together.
Solder and clean-up are done. Time for color.
The finished piece. Ready to send off to a show at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.