The Great Design Disaster presents Jewellery Was Never Innocent, an exhibition curated by Joy Herro, now open at the Patmion Cultural Center in Skala in Patmos

The Great Design Disaster presents Jewellery Was Never Innocent, an exhibition curated by Joy Herro, now open at the Patmion Cultural Center in Skala in Patmos, Greece. The exhibition explores jewellery as an extension of the body, a sculptural device, and a site where personal, social, and cultural meanings converge. Positioned between object and wearer, jewellery occupies a unique territory. It rests on the body while simultaneously transforming it, accentuating, concealing, extending, or redefining its presence. Neither entirely autonomous nor fully merged with the body, jewellery exists within a constantly negotiated boundary between self and object.

Bringing together artists, designers, architects, and creative practitioners whose primary disciplines lie outside contemporary jewellery, the exhibition invites participants to engage with the body as both subject and material. Working through their own formal languages and methodologies, each contributor has been asked to produce a work at the scale of the body, exploring jewellery not simply as ornament but as a medium capable of questioning perception, identity, presence, absence, and transformation.

The resulting works investigate the complex relationship between adornment and the human form. Some operate as wearable sculptures that alter posture and movement; others exist as traces, extensions, fragments, or speculative propositions. Together, they consider where the body ends and the object begins, and how jewellery can function simultaneously as a physical form and a carrier of meaning.