Betty Pham
she/her
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Betty Pham is a Vietnamese-American designer born and raised in Little Saigon, Garden Grove, California. Shaped by the resilient and jubilant Vietnamese immigrant community of Little Saigon, Betty’s work is catalyzed by prowess, playfulness, and the feeling of belonging. Tracing her design career back to watching her grandmother knit graphic sweaters as a toddler, she has an affinity for traditional female-dominated crafts and loves to imbue femininity in all of her pieces. Betty’s body of work is a collection of whimsical functional sculptures, furniture and fashion accessories in multiple mediums, but working primarily in metal and fiber. She is currently working towards a BFA in Product Design at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.
“Lesbian Manicure is one of three pieces from a jewelry collection I made titled For the Girls! (2023). I designed these adjustable nail cuffs to be worn by queer people who normally adorn long nails, but keep certain fingernails short for sexual activity. This piece emerged from my exploration of objects of protection, posing the question: how can objects make queer people feel safer? Lesbian Manicure offers queer people the option to reveal or mask themselves to their personal comfort level, protecting them from appearance-based assumptions.”
How does your work relate to the theme transformation— How does the work translate joy into strength?
"This piece is about adaptability and giving queer people the license to decide how open they want to be about their queerness. I made Lesbian Manicure as a reflection on my own journey of discovering my sexuality and figuring out when to come out and more importantly, the spaces which I felt comfortable to do so. Comfort with one’s sexuality isn’t something that happens overnight; it is often a slow transformation process. These nail cuffs explore queer expression during this transformative time. They propose that jewelry, fashionable adornments, can be not only a means of expression, but also inexpression. When one wears the nail cuffs, they are covering the fingers that reveal information about their sexual activity, doing so in a covertly fashionable way. Lesbian Manicure is about giving jewelry purpose beyond aesthetics, exploring how adornment can be both beautiful and protective. It gives its wearer the freedom to choose how the extent to which they want to express their queerness, and that choice alone is a very powerful thing."
"Lesbian Manicure", Sterling silver, 1”x .5”x .5”, 2023