Vega Vosbeek
They/She
Oakland, CA, USA
Vega Vosbeek (they/she) is a self-taught jeweler, fashion designer and producer, community steward, arts educator, and lifelong organizer. She immersed herself in the world of metalworking and design in 2023 after a short career as a public elementary school teacher. Jaded by the system but enamored with arts and education, June created JEMINIII, an independent jewelry brand dedicated to queer community and sustainability. Since 2023, JEMINIII has adorned hundreds of bodies and shared knowledge with hundreds more through jewelry fabrication workshops. June has also collaborated on numerous community projects including stewarding Sacred Maker Arts Collective, an arts community and makerspace centering decolonization and transformative justice, co-producing the annual EMERGENCE fashion show, and curating a group exhibition at Crisis Club Gallery. They are always looking for the next opportunity to make meaning and are excited to share this with others.
“My work is a conduit for the universe to express itself, refracted through radical trans sensibilities. I create in gratitude to the world for providing the shapes, textures, and sounds that inspire me. I draw from ancestral metalworking techniques and styles as well as contemporary disruptions of artistic hierarchies. My artistry is a call to return, a form of resistance against incessant progress and extraction, and an instrument for honoring trans bodies through adornment.”
www.jeminiii.com
How does your work relate to the theme of flourish(ing)?
“In a moment when trans people and our bodies are being violently politicized, it can be hard to imagine a world beyond our immediate survival. We are forced to fight for rights like medicine and restroom access, so intimately tied to our corporeality. SHED is a piece of my collective worldbuilding, designed to imagine futures into being and recenter the sacredness of the trans body. It is a meditation on transformation and remembrance, a prayer to flourishing as future ancestors.
The centerpiece incorporates snake shed and dried sphagnum moss from an Irish peat bog. Both are symbols of transformation. Both are medicine themselves. In the bog, sphagnum moss creates an environment so acidic and anaerobic that nothing else can live, and yet nothing fully dies. Bodies are mummified, sacrificial treasures are preserved, and instead of decomposing, the moss becomes peat that is burned for light and warmth.
As trans people, we know this liminal space between life and death all too well. In conditions not fit for our survival (or designed against it), we insist on creating life – on flourishing. We shed our skin time and time again to adapt to this growth. This piece holds an amulet encased in glass and metal. The fractal forms growing out of it wrap the body like moss, preserving its form for future generations. Ultimately, this piece reflects my hope and belief that our community will flourish so far into the future that our existence is mythologized and our people rightly deified.”
"SHED", Cast aluminum, snake shed, sphagnum moss, glass, soft solder, hardware, 14”x15”, 2025, Mikie SchulzHow does your creative practice allow you to flourish (grow, thrive, blossom)?
“I began creating jewelry as a means of creating myself. For so much of my life, I felt disconnected from my own existence, removed from a body or community that felt like home. Raised as a boy but secretly a girl, my first experiments in femininity were large, dangly earrings, and this gradually evolved into creating chainmail earrings for myself as I began making sense of my identity and how to express it. I never stopped adorning myself, and my practice has grown alongside of me through numerous transitions. Creating is a deeply emotional and spiritual practice for me, a portal to composting pain, making meaning, and connecting with ancestors. I understand the pieces I create as a language to make legible the story of myself in relation to the world. This language has allowed me to blossom into my whole being, and I hope to help others flourish as well through sharing adornment and the means to create it.
I am blessed to have cultivated a life centered around jewelry creation and metalworking. After being burnt out from working as a public school teacher, I leaned heavily into creating and sharing both the products and knowledge of this creation with my community. I was able to partially pay the bills by selling jewelry, and now most of my income is born from teaching jewelry classes and workshops. The freedom I create for myself by navigating the hellscape of capitalism this way (and that I have been blessed to have access to) allows me to invest in creative projects that deeply nourish myself and others. This is where I find the deep healing of communal creation: makerspaces, fashion shows, and DIY galleries have all been sites of incredible transformation and opportunity for my community, and I view creating them as an extension of my art practice as well.
Put concisely, my dream as an artist is to imagine opportunities in order to make them real and bring my people with me. When a flower blooms, it creates seeds that allow new flowers to be born. This is how I understand my creative practice.”
As a queer+ artist, what would you like to see and/or what do you need in order to flourish during this time?
“This is a difficult moment for the arts and for queer – especially and specifically, trans – people in the United States. As trans people and artists, our resources are being ripped away from us on multiple fronts. We now find ourselves fighting harder for the fewer and fewer crumbs that were already paltry to begin with.
As a trans person, a trans woman specifically, I need our “allies” and “accomplices” to be as committed to our survival as we are. I see “Protect the Dolls” plastered on social media, t-shirts, even Mariah Carey’s sequined jacket, yet nothing has changed materially for our community. For the dolls to really be protected, we need mutual aid funds dedicated to our survival, free healthcare (including mental healthcare), job opportunities, self-defense training and weapons. And we need people to be fighting for us, whether it’s advocating for trans healthcare or cultivating supportive community spaces for queer and trans people, so that we don’t have to do all of this for ourselves. This support is so essential – we can’t flourish as artists if we can’t even survive.
As artists, the support we need as queer and trans people is specific and sparse as well. Within the jewelry industry, there is an enormous lack of trans representation largely due to the high cost of entry and relative shortage of resources within our community. I would love to see skillshares and technical metalworking/fabrication trainings made accessible with priority for trans and BIPOC artists. I would love to see queer artist mentorship programming where emerging artists can learn from queer elders who have navigated these troubled waters before. I would love for more resources, including funding, tools, and knowledge, to be directed to our community, and I would love opportunities to learn how we can access these resources ourselves. For example, grantwriting workshops can give us the means to redistribute resources to ourselves.
I believe in my community and I know we will flourish regardless of the conditions we face – but these things would certainly make it easier.”
[queerphoria]v4 @ ECU Symposium