Bruce Metcalf’s whimsical jewelry plays with narrative storytelling, encouraging you to question what you’re seeing and what’s happening. In this piece, featuring a cartoonish figure—with its hair standing straight up, its face obscured, arms wrapped around an enormous peach, with legs seemingly in motion—you are invited to fill in the blanks. Where is this figure going with this giant peach? Using humble materials and a seemingly humorous subject, Metcalf pushes us to question our assumptions of what jewelry should be. Deeply versed in jewelry history, he intentionally breaks with tradition in his own work. He describes this brooch as part of a series in “which leaves and seed pods became the figures' heads, suggesting a curious hybrid of nature and culture,” inspired by ceremonial staffs from the Baule people of the Ivory Coast.

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