Stress-Eating 2019

Pendant
14K gold, silver loop, thread.
2020

The conceptual part of this pendant was in the works for nearly 2 years.

When in the summer of 2018 I returned home from 5 years in Israel, at first I was euphoric: no language barrier, surrounded by old friends etc. But slowly I started feeling more and more down: old friends had new lives, my new skills seemed unneeded, the weather was unpleasant, so by the time winter came I found myself at a really low point.

I found solace in junk food: emotional eating, stress-eating, over-eating – all of these became my close companions in the year 2019, so by the end of that year I was really shocked when online statistics of my bank account showed how much I spent in McDonalds. I was equally shocked when I realized how much weight I gained.

WWJD? What Would Jeweler Do? I translated the sum I spent on junk food into grams of gold and cast a small pendant of the same weight. The entire year of stress-eating could be expressed by mere 5.43 grams of gold.

It is interesting what had happened next: for the entire year 2020 I haven’t touched junk food at all, not even a little, because I didn’t want to ruin such a beautiful concept: a talisman against emotional eating. I lost 9 kilos by the way, but it’s not the point. What is the point, you ask? The power of conceptual jewelry, of course!

Photos by: Katia Rabey, Arseniy Kuntsevich