The Hidden Life of Jewellery: Storage as a Narrative Practice

However, this focus on immediate visibility and bodily engagement overlooks a fundamental aspect of jewellery’s material existence. For much of its lifetime, jewellery is neither worn nor displayed. Instead, it resides in states of storage: kept in drawers, jewellery boxes, wardrobes, archives, cabinets, or other domestic and institutional spaces.
 
What happens to jewellery when it is no longer worn or visible? These prolonged periods of containment are often regarded as inactive intervals: moments in which jewellery is removed from sensory engagement and temporarily suspended from active use. Drawing on my ongoing PhD research, this article challenges that assumption by arguing that storage is an active narrative practice through which jewellery continues to preserve, transform, and generate meaning (see Figure 1, Top of the article). Rather than presenting storage as a completed methodology, this article offers it as an interim proposition: a design condition through which contemporary jewellery may be reconsidered beyond visibility, wearability, and display.


Beyond Wearing and Display: Jewellery in Its Post-Maker Era
The “post-maker era” describes the life of jewellery after its making, when an object continues to evolve, acquire meaning, and enter relationships with wearers, viewers, environments, and systems of care. Following Ingold’s (2013) understanding of making as an ongoing process of correspondence between materials, people, and environments, jewellery can be understood not as a completed object, but as an evolving narrative that unfolds through use, display, storage, repair, inheritance, forgetting, and return.
 
Historically and curatorially, wearing and displaying have been treated as the dominant modes of activating jewellery’s agency. Through wearing, jewellery enters into direct relation with the body and becomes part of identity, gesture, ritual, and social communication (Skinner, 2013). When removed from the body, interpretation often shifts towards display, transforming jewellery into a curated object isolated for external observation (Dormer, 1994). Yet, relying solely on this immediate visibility and present availability reduces storage to a merely inactive, latent interval. Shifting from this framework, my concern is to investigate what happens when storage becomes an active constituent of jewellery’s structural logic, material condition, and anticipated future life (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Jewellery lifecycle pathways with a focus on storage in the post-maker era (2025). Diagram by the author.


In material culture studies, storage has been understood not simply as non-use, but as a meaningful state through which domestic things continue to hold memory, order, identity, and future possibility (Cwerner and Metcalfe, 2003; Woodward, 2015). Within jewellery discourse, this suggests that removal from the body or public view does not suspend narrative engagement, but may reorganise its relationships with time, intimacy, care, and future encounter.
 
Existing examples suggest that the object’s significance may lie not only in being seen, but also in being hidden, protected, and privately known. In museums, storage functions as an active site of knowledge potential and narrative formation (Brusius and Singh, 2017). Atkinson (2023) observes that museum storage can demand more curatorial attention than display (see Figure 3), reflecting how objects may be “out of sight, but not out of mind”.


Figure 3: Museum object storage process (2023). Adapted from Atkinson (2023).


Long before storage became a subject of contemporary enquiry, jewellery objects already carried storage functions within their material and emotional structures. Lover’s Eye miniatures (c.1817) (Figure 4), for instance, carried affection close to the body while remaining partially concealed from public recognition; their meaning depended on a selective visibility in which the beloved’s identity was recognisable only to the recipient. Lin Cheung’s SECRET – LOCKED LOCKET (2005) (Figure 5) similarly sustains meaning through secrecy and inaccessibility: a piece of jewellery that holds a secret is permanently locked inside the locket, so the narrative is not revealed through opening, but maintained through the impossibility of knowing.


Figure 4: Eye Miniature in an Ivory Case with a Mirrored Lid (c.1817). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Source: Lang Antiques.

Figure 5: Lin Cheung, SECRET – LOCKED LOCKET (2005). Necklace, 18k gold. Image courtesy of Gallery SO.


Although not jewellery in a narrow sense, Adi Toch’s Earth to Earth (2023) (Figure 6) extends this concern with place and invisibility into material transformation. By burying copper vessels in soil and retrieving them after a period of concealment, the project foregrounds how invisibility, time, and environment can actively reshape an object’s material and narrative condition.


Figure 6: Adi Toch, Earth to Earth (2023). Objects, copper. Image courtesy of the artist.


However, within contemporary jewellery practice, storage is not always named directly, nor is it usually treated as a design condition in its own right. Related states such as secrecy, concealment, absence, domestic memory, delayed encounter, and hidden transformation have often appeared through individual works, but less often as a systematic consideration of storage as a phase in jewellery’s life. This opens the question of how jewellery design might approach storage not simply as a hidden or invisible state, but as an overarching material, spatial, and temporal condition that shapes the biography of the object.


Storage as a Narrative Practice
In my own practice, this question is explored by giving form to storage through traces, containers, protective materials, and delayed forms of encounter. These elements are not treated as separate thematic categories, but as interconnected expressions of how storage operates across space, time, and material forms. They reveal how storage enters the object’s biography: through trace and material absence; through container, memory, and secrecy; and through protection, reconfiguration, and future encounter.
 
In Missing Ring (2026) (Figure 7), the question of storage is approached through the trace left by removal: how an object might still be sensed when it is no longer materially visible. The word ‘missing’ is formed as raised text on the inside of the ring and remains hidden while the ring is worn. When the ring is removed, the word leaves a temporary imprint on the finger. Here, the transition into storage is understood not as a condition of disappearance, but as a somatic trace where memory, loss, and possible return are physically sustained.


Figure 7: Yaning Liu, Missing Ring (2026). Ring, silver. Photograph by the author.


In Not at Home (2026) (Figure 8), storage is explored through the relationship between a ring and its box. Inside the box, I drew an image from memory, referring to a specific time, place, and personal experience associated with the ring. The ring slot is stitched over with red thread, both completing the image inside the box and marking the slot as a place that still belongs to the ring. The thread then extends beyond the box to connect with the ring outside it; consequently, even when the ring is removed, it remains tied to the memory and temporal condition of its storage. The work suggests that the box does not simply store the ring; it stores a moment, a place, and a relationship that cannot be fully released.


Figure 8: Yaning Liu, Not at Home (2026). Ring and ring box; vintage gold-plated silver ring, vintage ring box, thread, pencil drawing. Photograph by the author.


The concept of storage is embedded through the tension between protection and intimacy in Intimate Distance - Suspend (2025) (Figure 9). Bubble wrap, printed with hand gestures and embedded with pearls, functions as both a protective material and a metaphor. It shields the pearls while also keeping them at a distance from the body. In this suspended condition, intimacy is not direct, but mediated through a protective surface, transforming a functional packaging material into a site of emotional distance.
Figure 9: Yaning Liu, Intimate Distance - Suspend (2025). Object/pearl necklace; bubble wrap (UV-printed), freshwater pearl. Photograph by the author.


New Necklace (2024) (Figure 10) approaches storage as a structure for circulation and future encounter. The work takes the form of a book, functioning as an archival container with a pearl necklace held between pages of different side portraits. As the pages are turned, the necklace appears to move from one body to another, entering a sequence of possible wearings. Through the act of turning pages, storage ceases to be a state of rest and becomes a delayed process of encounter.


Figure 10: Yaning Liu, New Necklace (2024). Object/necklace; paper, freshwater pearl, brass. Photograph by the author.


Across these works, storage is not treated as a secondary condition after making. It is materially built into the structure, access, and narrative operation of the work. It becomes a way of shaping how jewellery is absent, held, protected, delayed, and re-encountered.


Concluding Thoughts and Open Questions
Storage is not a stable or purely positive condition. It can preserve, but it can also interrupt. It can protect, but it can also isolate. It can hold memory, but it can also hide, fragment, or alter it. This tension prevents storage from being understood only as care or preservation. Thus, storage may emerge as a complex design condition that can shape objects’ narrative lifecycle in different ways.
 
This conceptual inquiry opens a dialogue between theory and practice by asking what might change if storage were no longer treated as jewellery’s background, but as an active part of its narrative life: a condition through which absence, concealment, delay, and future encounter can shape how jewellery is made, kept, and understood.
 
The challenge, then, extends beyond designing jewellery for storage to understanding how storage itself can act as a narrative, material, and relational force within jewellery’s continuing life.



Bibliography
- Atkinson, A. (2023) Out of Sight, But Not Out of Mind. Montpelier. Available at: https://www.montpelier.org/out-of-sight-but-not-out-of-mind/.
- Brusius, M. and Singh, K. (eds.) (2017) Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt. London: Routledge.
- Cheung, L. (2005) SECRET – LOCKED LOCKET. Available at: https://www.galleryso.com/artists/89-lin-cheung/works/2266/.
- Cwerner, S.B. and Metcalfe, A. (2003) 'Storage and clutter: Discourses and practices of order in the domestic world', Journal of Design History, 16(3), pp. 229–239. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1316333.
- Dormer, P. (1994) The Art of the Maker: Skill and Its Meaning in Art, Craft and Design. London: Thames & Hudson.
- Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
- Lang Antiques (n.d.) Lover's Eye Miniature. Available at: https://www.langantiques.com/university/lovers-eye-miniature-2/.
- Skinner, D. (ed.) (2013) Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective. Asheville, NC: Lark Crafts.
- Toch, A. (2023) Earth to Earth. Available at: https://aditoch.com/project/earthtoearth/.
- Woodward, S. (2015) ‘The hidden lives of domestic things: accumulations in cupboards, lofts and shelves’, in Casey, E. and Taylor, Y. (eds) Intimacies: Critical Consumption and Diverse Economies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 216–232.

 

About the author

Yaning Liu is a contemporary jewellery artist and researcher based between the UK and China, whose work has been exhibited internationally. He holds a BA from Beijing Union University and completed an MA in Jewellery and Metal at the Royal College of Art in 2024. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where his research explores the narrative potential of jewellery in its stored state and proposes storage as an active design condition within contemporary jewellery practice.

Liu’s work investigates the existential context of jewellery through bodily, sensory, and spatial engagement. Through processes of recontextualisation, he examines how jewellery enters into symbolic relationships with everyday environments, objects, and human gestures. His practice frequently works with containers, found objects, and the visual language of ordinary materials, using states of presence, absence, concealment, and delayed encounter to reconsider how jewellery may continue to hold, shift, or generate meaning beyond moments of wearing.


Website: https://yaningliu.my.canva.site, https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/yaning-liu, https://klimt02.net/jewellers/yaning-liu
Ins: @yaningjewellery
Email: yaningliu.art@gmail.com