Artwork
Chatelaine for Anxious Days
Referencing the entire foundational structure, and pragmatic history, of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s sterling silver Tiffany chatelaine, expanding existentially upon its particular quotidian household tool attachments, Julie Rauer has transformed a fascinating temporal artifact into a metaphysical trawler of portable sanctuaries - creating organic “tool” attachments, hybridized biological mechanisms, metaphorical entities cultured from vital cellular matrices isolated and cultivated from nature, art and science, which have profound and boundless capacities to heal the fragmented soul: forest tool, painters studio as life cycle of vascular plants, symphony, Koi pond, library, epicurean pursuits in Kyoto cuisine, dissection of language evolving as writers tool.. all tethered to, and arborizing from an amphibious chatelaine head, visualizing the fantastical metamorphosis of the Eastern Newt, distinctive for its radical developmental morphologies.