ARTIST INFO

RAISSA BUMP
Portland, OR

METAL | Jewelry

Penland Affiliation | Penland Instructor (Metals and Textiles) 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2019, Penland Studio Assistant 2003, 2004

Artist Information | Studio artist; education: BFA Rhode Island School of Design, Alchimia School of Contemporary Jewelry and Design, Studio Arts Center International; exhibitions: WEAR | Contemporary Jewelry (Penland Gallery, NC), Signs of Life (Facere Gallery, WA), Shadow Themes (Reinstein/ Ross Gallery, NY); board member and chair, Art Jewelry Forum

Artist Statement | Jewelry has been a through-line that has fueled my view of life and made me want to participate. I believe there is a deep nexus between jewelry, beauty, and happiness. I believe there is wild variety in our human experience, and there should be many ways to convey on the outside some small bit of the beauty of our inner lives. My jewelry provides one with the opportunity to meet that wild variety and run with it.

Poet and essayist Lia Purpura’s words about my jewelry express much of what I feel while making: “Raïssa Bump’s [jewelry is] firmly contemporary, and yet they also feel solidly rooted in the past – as if they were archeological finds. Their forms suggest that, once, long ago, a hand worked with objects just like these, dug, or scooped with them, stitched them together or used them as sacred containers into which something treasured, to be passed down through generations, might be slipped for safe keeping. Though meant to embellish the body, contained within her jewelry is the utility and liveliness of essential tools – a quality that might suggest we reexamine the beauty of tools, and by extension, the aesthetic properties of raw materials (the gentleness of silver, the liquidity of diamonds), the organic delicacy to be found in urban landscapes, the mathematics of the natural world. We might, with her guidance, experience the multiple expressive selves that take up residence in a single glorious object.”