Julian Malloy
Any Pronouns
California
“Julian is a metal arts student in San Francisco California explore themes of bodily autonomy and transformation. They came into jewelry making through working in the body piercing industry and started taking metal arts classes at San Francisco City College. They were awarded the Barbara M. Berk Scholarship from the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco in 2025. Julian has worked as a harm reductionist for the past decade. Their jewelry at present serves as a material reflection as a queer and trans person facing an increasingly hostile political environment, and their attempts to find meaning in it through rituals of adornment.”
“As a young person, I would collect bits of metal treasures on walks and create found jewelry from what others might consider “trash.” I am drawn to metals ability to be shaped and transformed endlessly. I am interested in adornment practices around the world, jewelry's use in ritual, and the interaction of the body in and relationship to the environment. I see jewelry as connection with the self, others, and the world in that we are compelled to shape and wear the materials of the Earth with us.”
@ritualpraxis
How does your work relate to the theme of restoration?
“This piece memorializes my first professional piercing at the piercing studio I would come to work at over a decade later and begin my journey into jewelry making, with a specific interest in creating body jewelry and body piercing practices. It reflects the burdens faced by trans people in a currently hostile political climate and our attempts to restore agency through acts that transcend norms and boundaries of society and of the body. The piece is meant to evoke the experience of a tongue piercing--requiring adapting to new ways of expressing, consuming, sensing, and thinking about the world; the discomfort, the healing, the added weight, the added shine, the inherent risk of breaking a tooth and disappointing your dentist, or perhaps worse, someone seeing it who shouldn't and being found out to be the freak you are.”
"Cold Steel" Maxx Malloy
How does your creative practice allow you to restore (renew, return, reclaim, recover)?
“Art connects me to the real. It externalizes my experience into something I can see myself in. It keeps me engaged in a conversation with myself about what I'm really feeling, thinking, and doing, often uncovering something hidden in the process. It brings me into a community of others creatives and those who are willing to engage in a meaning-making process. I think all art as a cycle of making the world through making the self. ”
As a queer+, artist, what do you see can be, needs to be, or cannot be restored?
“My present focus has primarily been on a restoration of bodily autonomy to all people, but trans people in particular. I see the world around us needing to be restored through respect, reverence for the beauty of creation inherent in our being, and humanity reclaiming us as belonging to it.”
Photographs Courtesy of the Artist
Anything else you would like to share about this work? This can be an important part of the process, sourcing materials, or research.
“The pendant piece is ancient bronze cast via lost wax method, which was both carved and sculpted from hard and soft wax. The repurposed barbells are made from implant grade titanium , the same that would be used for professional body piercing, which were sourced from the studio I was first pierced at and later worked in.”