Lacquered by Angela Casserly

Lacquered is a new jewelry line by San Francisco-based artist Angela Casserly. Casserly turns her artists’ eye on to her jewelry, and creates stunning sculptural pieces to adorn the necks of gothic goddesses. Each piece is handmade and custom, so that no two are alike, and the result is that you wear a piece of her sculpture. Her pieces are dense, crawling with insects and writhing scaled creatures, but at the same time they exhibit a lightness, and look as if they could fly away at any moment. They are immortalized in lacquer, an entomological still-life that hangs from chain. She often uses bats as the body of the piece, coating their leathery wings with moths and beetles and winding lizards at their feet. One of my favorite of her pieces is a broach with a snake’s head peeking out between butterfly wings. If all this description sounds flowery to you, what brings her jewelry an element of dark, ominous beauty is it’s thick blackness, as well as the shapes she creates out of organic bodies. Lacquered can be bought from Casserly’s Etsy shop HERE. After the jump, take a look at a gallery infested with beauty…