Sahaya James (b. 1998) is a London based visual artist and self-styled mud jeweller reflecting on craft fetishism and luxury in the age of scarcity with a practice that sits at the intersection between research, fashion and material culture studies. Setting out to embody a hostile decadence, her work, often conceptualised as pleasure objects, deals in themes of labour, gender, pleasure, and harm. Through studies of jewellery, wider ornamental culture and weaponry she examines labour exploitation, extractive industries and how value and status is assigned and exchanged. This also informs James’s choice of material and conceptual interest in ceramics, rooted in a reading of clay as mud, she purposefully “reduces” it to this base reality while using it to imitate the stones we assign value to and the metals synonymous with durability and force. This is most explicit in the recurrent motif of “mud diamonds” present across her material studies, jewellery collections, and sculptural projects. Within this wide ranging practice chain represents a point of convergence, understood as both a material and a process, it links adornment, restraint, strength and fluidity. This framework recasts chain-mail, specifically its assembly or production, as a unit of time and thus document of labour.
Within this context wearable decoration or jewellery is read through its communicative function, in particular its ability to articulate the interplay between bodies and matter, status and identity, pleasure and violence. Specifically interested in the tension between adornment and restraint - the desire to decorate versus the possessive impulse to restrict and restrain James often draws from the design of weaponry and self-defence instruments, contesting the distinction between these objects and jewellery.
The shared maximalism of South Asian iconography and hip-hop visual culture also heavily inspire James’s work, serving as a visual language to explore excess and luxury in times of scarcity and growing distrust in the
hegemonic signifiers of old. Considering South Asian ornamental traditions through the lens of bling culture she combines the influences of her own heritage with an admiration for hip-hop jewellers and interest in the genre’s resonance and impact in the Global South. Aiming to bring into conversation the codes of these two rich aesthetic cultures, she sets out to create collections — focused on rings, knuckle dusters, septums and pendants — that carry these traditions and all they tell us about how identity and class is articulated and celebrated through dress.
EMAIL //
enquiries@sahayajames.com
INSTAGRAM //
@sahaya__james
CV