Johanna Zellmer

My Great-grandmother’s Bones, the DNA Collector and Hard Cash are collars that emerged during the first year of my creative, practice-led PhD studies. I experimented with heating Illumina NovaSeq and NextSeq frames to make a chain-link collar. By casting one frame into €0.20 and €0.50 coins, a metal alloy known as Nordic Gold, I conceived My Great-grandmother’s Bones. DNA accumulated from loose change, which had passed through countless hands over time, was eradicated in the process of melting the coins, together with the money’s function. And yet, this transformed material continued to absorb the warmth of the human body. I cut lengthwise through a tightly spiralling cast structure, made from Illumina MiSeq lids. Placed on the nape of my neck, this golden helix adopts my body temperature as if submerging through the skin.

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I cast further frames and helix structures in sterling silver by recycling a water vessel I had made 25 years earlier. For the DNA Collector I re-fitted several blackened silver and Nordic Gold MiSeq frames with their original hinged plastic lids and strung them together. The lid’s tiny rubber gaskets provided enough friction to insert four opposing entomological pins through two miniscule gasket holes. The affective experience of this precariously prickly structure becomes perceptible against the bare skin of a human neck, unremittingly collecting and shedding DNA.

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In the process of cutting MiSeq metal frames off their sprues, I needed to bend neighbouring partial casts out of the way to allow my jewellery saw, burs and cutting wheels to reach into tight places. The bent structures of Hard Cash with their fluid, golden movement were knotted together with suede thonging. The necklace weighed heavily on my collarbones and shoulders like a slipped crown. Its perceived value and seemingly ritualistic importance connected its aesthetics to the history of royal jewellery, signifying power.

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Lastly, I plucked the golden-hued, translucent RFID chips off the MiSeq lids onto which they had been glued. Drawn in by the chips’ jewel-like resemblance to eyes, I domed both of their sides with silicone stoppers. I piled these watchful tracking devices onto a white gel pack used to cool flow cells during shipping, carefully surrounding the gel pack’s warning ‘Do not apply to [a] body. Do not ingest’. This assembly highlighted the contrast between the material and immaterial, the observational experience of science and the lived experience of adornment, which is inherent to my practice.