Wren Schulz
they/he
Athens, GA, USA
Wren Schulz is a disabled trans nonbinary metalsmith based out of Athens, Georgia. They work with layering mediums, textures, and colors to explore the queerness of objects and how they can serve as a conduit for identification and expression.
“As a trans masculine person, I think a lot about my introduction to craft – craft passed down mother to daughter, learning to knit and sew, to care for generations of history in tea cups and fabric scraps. I think about the separation needed to gain male acceptance – the slip into erasure. I think about how to exist outside of both. ‘Reemergence’ is the culmination of those thoughts, a collection of discarded parts, gathered and formed into a new whole – a meeting place where fiber and chain and plastic can exist in cohesion, dependent on the whole.”
What does being queer mean to you in relation to your material choices? Is it something you consider?
“Being queer is something that I think about a lot when making material choices. The celebration of queer identity, to me, has always been about intersectionality — where our personal upbringing and heritage meets our collective queer history and the ways we work to enhance both through each other. I tend to approach materials in a very similar way, incorporating traditional metals practices like chainmail and enamel in combination with more modern materials like acrylic and powder coat. I like to think of my material choices as a combining of identities – the more masculine craft of armor and chain, the feminine history of embroidery and fiber art, the vibrance and resilience of plastics and how I relate them to queerness. The construction of my work is also something that I think of as queer, each part layered on through cold connections, sturdy, yet with the continuous possibility of disassembly and reassembly that I associate so heavily with moving through life as a queer person."
"Reemergence", Acrylic, copper, aluminum, fiber, powder coat, gel pen, paint, brass, 17" x 13.5" x 1.5", 2024Is the work queer because the maker is queer, or is it queer because the subject matter is queer?
“Both. The work is queer because each and every part has been touched by a queer maker – my thoughts, my feelings, my design. It’s queer because of where it sits on the body, what it frames, what it hides, what it celebrates. It’s queer because as a queer artist, and especially as a trans artist, I find it impossible to separate myself from my work – by making jewelry, I am making for trans bodies and their adornment.
It is also queer because the subject matter is queer, because it interacts with and speaks to a queer experience, a conscious connection with past and a constant push toward future that is innately part of living as a queer person."
Anything else you would like to share about this work? This can be an important part of the process, sourcing materials, or research.
“The large majority of materials used in this piece were found/repurposed scrap – the acrylic was pulled from a dumpster, the fabric and yarn parts of a scrap stash started when I was a child, the aluminum sourced from a local supplier's offcuts, and the powder coat passed down from another artist.”
