Human Skin Jewelry

GODREKR · #1 ● 08-11-2014, 06:21 PM

For your consideration: a $500,000 ring mounted with a tanned sliver of hairy human skin. The piece, titled the Forget Me Knot ring, is the creation of boundary-pushing Icelandic fashion and jewelry designer Sruli Recht. For these one-of-a-kind works of art, Recht had a 110 by 10 millimeter a strip of his skin surgically removed from his abdomen; the artist then salted it, tanned it, and embedded it on a gold ring.

The work, though grisly, carries with it a raw sexual potency. Its title refers, of course, to marriage, or “tying the knot;” in this way, the piece is unabashedly intimate, tying literal bodily fleshiness with the idea of love and intimacy. The ring’s beauty lies in its refusal to be pretty; its hairy, gray, and it’s gruesome physicality operates as a strangely comforting promise that two people might become “one flesh.”

The medicinal and scientific references of the rings strangely reinforce this idea of devotion. Complicating the relationship between jeweler and client, the ring comes with a certificate of authenticity, providing DNA validation that the slash is in fact the artist’s, and a DVD graphically documenting the making of the ring, including the surgical removal of flesh. With these items, Recht creates a personal catalog of both his molecular and artistic existence, offering himself to a potential wearer in uncomfortable yet touching ways.

In a documented one-time surgery-performance, a plastic surgeon removed a 110mm x 10mm strip of skin from the abdomen of Sruli Recht. The subcutaneous tissue and epidermis was then scraped from the dermis, which is stripped of fat by hand and blade, before being salted, and tanned with an Alum solution. The resulting leather from the dermis was prepared for use in the ring, Forget Me Knot.

SR661 - Leather made from the abdomen skin of Sruli Recht, mounted to a 24 carat gold band.

There will be only one of this piece made.

The Forget Me Knot band is presented with a DNA certificate and a complete DVD documentary of the process, surgery and interviews with the involved team.

Forget Me Knot

SR661, Nov/Dec 2012, 1 of 1

Anthropodermic leather and 24 carat gold

€350,000

See it here.

See also: Gloves for Life - Basking Shark Skin Gloves