Sarah Sindler / KING RELD
she/they
Sarah Jane Sindler, owner and designer of KING RELD is an avant-garde creator of custom and ready-made jewelry and fashion wearables. She is also a teaching-artist at Center for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media, and Protohaven and also private lessons at her studio at The Brewhouse in Pittsburgh, PA.
She graduated with a Bachelors in Visual/Studio Arts and Environmental Creative Writing from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. She completed a 5-year apprenticeship under third-generation jeweler Ira Helfer of David I. Helfer Jewelers in Pittsburgh in 2019. Sindler has been exhibited by the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Society of North American Goldsmiths, among others.
“KING RELD explores how social media, popular social trends, and natural competition affect our instincts, our interpersonal relationships, and how we connect to our natural world, and the health of our environment. Our need to be perceived stirs a very real want for validation and popularity, which, undoubtedly, leads to social paranoia and anxiety, but a potential to look inward or to realign with nature, line, and form. This society we find ourselves living in has been created by us and many others before us, but it feels directly oppositional to ancient patterns and ecologies that were once balanced and vibrant.”
How does your work relate to the theme Adorned Serenity—
How does the work function as a wearable safe space?
“My body is a space of great importance and expression. I move through public and diverse social spaces with a sort of practiced confidence, even more so by wearing adornments and jewelry, like this piece Pearl Lizard. This beaded lizard turns heads and places me and others back into a setting of nostalgia and childlike whimsy. The piece becomes a safe space and the wearer and some viewers come along, but not all of them, of course, only the ones who have made a beaded keychain for themself or for their best childhood friend know the gravity of this nostalgic piece, this space of friendship and platonic love. I believe this platonic love to be the root of all queerness. This safe space is where, as kids, we created our first chosen families. This piece engages a ‘looking back’ which can move us from our current reality, that may feel unsafe or unstable, into one that may be more comfortable, but also more safely vulnerable. The Pearl Lizard can allow for a physical connection to a previously lived experience.”
Pearl Lizard, pearls, thread, french wire, 24" x 5" x .25", 2023
“The beauty of the Pearl Lizard is that it is as specific to me as it is to you. Because the design is reminiscent of a younger you, you may be more drawn to it, but maybe you are just drawn to the little you that you know so much more about, so much more about how to take care of that little you. You can show this love for your younger self by the live and self care that you engage in now in the present. The Pearl Lizard links my childhood and pre-teenage years to my present world and what exactly I know I need. The ‘heirloomification’ of this plastic beaded toy seeks to encapsulate the nostalgia for my own posterity and conceptually, I think it becomes an armor which holds my younger self within the weight and luster of its pearl body. When worn, I feel as though I am wearing the heart of my younger self upon my adult sleeve, so vulnerable.”
How do you see this piece existing in the world as a wearable safe space?
Or is this piece specific to you?
If someone found this piece and needed an instruction manual to make the safe space work — what’s a quick how to?
“Hold the piece. Let the weight of it sit in your hands, now, pull the piece so you can feel each pearl roll against your hand, now dangle it across your cheek. Feel that the pearls are cool and smooth against your skin. Touch each pearl. Notice that each pearl is one-of-a-kind but also relative to the one next to it. Attach it to your keys or to your belt loop, even hang it on the wall, just make sure it’s accessible to hold and feel its weight in this world.”
“I created a traditional plastic beaded lizard at a summer camp themed wedding, recently, and I knew I needed to make another fully in pearls. The attention I garnered from wearing this keychain around was surprising, at first, until I realized the cultural weight this object bears. Many of my peers, and so many strangers, were drawn to this object because of the significance of its nostalgia in their lives. People would stop me on the street to tell me about one they had when they were a kid or one they had made for someone else. I know many people who made these as gifts for their best friends. It has been a joy to discover this lust for this nostalgic object and to create one with fine materials in an attempt to encapsulate it as an heirloom.”