Nikita Brooks - Germany / Australia / Italy
Nikita Brooks
Designer biography:
Nikita Brooks (she/they) is a Berlin-based, Australian-Italian studio-jeweller exploring beauty, time and gender through a queer lens. Their practice fuses intuitive composition, chance-driven processes and traditional methods to create one-off pieces. Brooks has a PhD in Curatorial Studies & Fashion Theory from Queensland University of Technology. For a decade her curatorial and archival work examined fashion display practices and histories of dress beyond dominant Euro-American contexts. After diagnosis with multiple chronic conditions; their father’s death; and the pandemic, Brooks turned to jewellery-making as an escape, slowly building the knowledge and techniques to realise her vision.
Collection concept:
With its close connection to the body and classification as a decorative-art-form, jewellery has been deemed less-worthy of academic attention due to its association with femininity and beauty. Traditionally worn to convey status, wealth and tied closely to concepts of identity, in recent Western history jewellery has also reinforced the gender binary. These rich contradictions and concepts pave the way for this collection which ‘queers’ traditional notions of gender in relation to jewellery, subverting heteronormative categories of masculine/feminine and going beyond these binaries to build a body of work that manifests ‘Queer Beauty’.
