Title: Grills
Year: 2024
Medium: Cast silver, custom fit

Description: Cultural representation in a contemporary context, with the contemporary art of dental molding and lost wax silver casting in jewelry techniques to make precise custom dental grills. In Andean countries such as Peru and Bolivia up until the generation before mine, it was common to see people with gold or silver teeth amongst Indigenous men and women of urban and rural communities. It is still common to see this today in elders in my homeland. As an artist this has always fascinated me and made me wonder about the connection to ancient pre-Columbian teeth jewelry made in gold, silver and precious stones as we can see in mummies of ancient Andean cultures. It seems like this fashion originated with our ancestors and reemerged later in history.