Images: Jonathan Rae
Words and styling: Saskia Edwards
Jewellery: Teresa Lee
Model: Gabz Tumataroa
What’s ugly? What’s beautiful?
Can scabs, blood, decaying flesh be adornments?
Well, Teresa Lee’s jewellery is beautiful.
But look a little closer, her grills are
rotten, her rings are deformed and her earrings are tarnished with blood and
intestines.
Teresa: “Some of these pieces have scrunched
and tangled hair that resembles hair from a shower plughole.
“It is interesting how parts of our body can be
attached at one moment and then treated like rubbish and thrown in the bin the
next moment.”
If you look even closer, you can see faces in
the silver. Teresa took old photographs, buried them with blood, dug them up
five days later and transferred the warped images onto silver.
“Well the whole concept was, some of
our family just ditched us because I don’t know, well I do know.
“But you think family sticks
together, but apparently not.
“The blood was representing the
deterioration of the relationship, but it was a family relationship. “
The blood is about Teresa’s DNA.
The locks allude to the Victorian
Era’s mourning jewellery, for the death of family relationships.
And the imperfections on the
photographs are about loss.
“The messing up the photos was to
show the memories meant nothing.”
Teresa’s grills are part of a more
recent series. They’re meant to evoke disgust.
“The mouth is not clean, it is full
bacteria, yet there is still hesitation to put a clean and safe, although
apparently gross, grill in the mouth.”
But in fact within the perceived
grotesques of these concepts lies the beauty of Teresa’s work.
It’s a forced reconsideration of
what’s beautiful.
Are pictures of vanity that permeate
modern internet culture real beauty?
Maybe these images are more repugnant
than scars or disfigurements.
Maybe our idols reach deity status
for superficiality and hollow morals.
Perhaps marred skin has more beauty
than the self-absorption of perfection.
