Carmen Winant Transforms High Jewelry into Stunning Works of Art

Carmen Winant is an institutional darling. Museums love the 41-year-old Ohio-based artist because she addresses difficult subjects like domestic violence, but is also able to find beauty in the communities that come together to tackle those issues. Her breakout moment came in 2018, when she stole the show at MoMA’s biannual “New Photography” exhibition with My Birth, an installation that transformed a hallway of the museum into a monument to the labor of childbirth. Unlike typically idealized celebrations of motherhood, Winant’s piece didn’t shy away from the violence that delivering a baby entails. The more than 2,000 images were culled from women’s health magazines, pamphlets stowed away in nonprofit archives, and other sources documenting everything from crowning heads covered in blood to peacefully sleeping mothers with babies on their breasts.

Winant, who grew up during the halcyon magazine era of the 1980s and 1990s, often begins her work by flipping through printed matter. When she finds something she likes, she cuts out the image or passage for later use, filing it away by topic. Some of the pages have become part of room-size installations at museums like MoMA, the Whitney, and ICA/Boston. Other times, they become books. Winant is an avid publisher of monographs, which lend themselves to the artist’s collagist mentality. “I’m really a studio artist. When I think about photographs, one of the things I’m most interested in is their material presence in life,” she says. “What do they feel like taped up? What do they feel like in your hand? What does it feel like to cut through them?”

Despite the weightiness of her usual subject matter— or perhaps precisely because of it—Winant was intrigued when W gave her carte blanche to create visual compositions using high jewelry pieces as her source material. She decided to take a break from her research-driven practice and focus on a commission that stimulated solely her compositional intuition. W provided the product imagery, and Winant got to work disassembling the jewels. She then put them back together to create abstractions that amplify the essence of the baubles—much in the same way her installations transform documents from the past into thought-provoking propositions for the present. “It’s exciting to take on these projects where there’s not the luxury to spend months stepping forward and stepping back,” says Winant of the experience. “Quick decisions need to be made, and things can’t be overintellectualized. You have to move based on feeling with a kind of body knowledge. It sends sparks flying.”