Welcome to Bonde, Beautiful, Bold, Handcrafted Jewelry that Graces the Skin and Honors the Body. Bonde is the concept of Bonnie Heras, professional jewelry designer and metalsmith.
Unafraid of investigating sensual, yet often disturbing forms that materialize in natural and human design, Bonnie Heras’ jewelry collections aim to reconcile graceful line work with machined precision. By using subtle, process-intensive techniques, her designs often achieve a layering effect that both conceals and exposes some truth about an object’s nature or origin, suggesting that personal decoration both reveals and obscures identity. A form dipped many times in a contrasting, often softer material, begins to evoke skin slowly growing over bone. Or alternately, any surface that is gradually stripped to its most essential. Her designs evoke a sense of both spatial and temporal movement. Slight, calculated irregularities in serialized objects suggest a methodic, organic shift over time. Layers, dimensions and textures begin to emerge as one might observe different degrees of growth or decay in nature.
Often, I am drawn to materials that question our sensual understanding of the world or challenge our assumptions about the nature of beauty. Common themes I explore are gravity, seduction and other unseen forces slowly acting upon objects and people over time, coaxing them into a visual versus verbal dialogue that is unspoken, uncertain and darkly alluring. Exploring this idea, I aim for each piece to generate both a visual and a tactile experience for the person who wears it — and for the person who views it being worn — perhaps inviting the piece, and the skin upon which it rests, to be touched. Or to spark that temptation.
How a piece feels on your skin, for me, is just as important as its visual impact. When a piece is placed on the body, it exerts a force. It also interacts with — and even invades — personal space. I aim to create pieces that waver between seen and unseen; that sometimes draw attention; that sometimes recede quietly into the surface of your skin. I aim to create pieces that unveil you; that conceal you; that become you.
–Bonnie Heras