So Fresh + So Clean 2026
The annual online international student exhibition
All applicants are Student Level Members
FRESH
Work that is happening now, challenging how we define the field of Jewelry and Metalsmithing.
CLEAN
Objectively looking at how our practices intersect with environmental concerns and human health.
A Message for the Artists
This year's So Fresh + So Clean invited jewelry and metalsmithing students to speculate on the future they desire or to challenge it altogether. Rather than forecasting solutions, the exhibition embraced the idea of "What If" as a way to open debate and expand possibilities.
Students from across the globe submitted images accompanied by written statements addressing political, personal, and social issues. As jurors, we responded most strongly to work that was articulate in both its visual presentation and written statement, and What If became the lens through which we viewed the exhibition.
From familiar materials such as metal and pearls to historical techniques like filigree and experimental materials such as seaweed, the works in the exhibition offer a glimpse into the breadth and diversity of contemporary jewelry.
Although experienced through a screen, the selected works conveyed a strong sense of materiality, allowing us to imagine their weight and texture while revealing the hand of the maker in each piece.
Mary Hallam Pearse
In the SF+SC 2026 prompt, artists were asked to consider what it means to be a maker in our fractured world.
Many students and emerging artists today are navigating profound pressures like climate emergency, political instability, grief, burnout, financial strain, illness, caregiving, and more. What may look like “lack of motivation” is often something far more complex. In a fractured world that asks artists to keep producing despite uncertainty and exhaustion, this exhibition asks a different question: what futures can be imagined through care, refusal, and collective making?
We invited student jewelers, metalsmiths, and interdisciplinary makers to submit work for an exhibition exploring speculative futures through adornment and metal. Drawing on the concept of speculative design, we are asking “what if?” instead of forecasting trends or promising solutions. This lens opens debate and generates alternatives. A speculative future does not need to be polished or optimistic. Asking the question “what if?” is not an act of blind optimism; rather, it is a practice of hope. These artists presented work that considered both the world they want to work towards and the futures that they refuse.
To this year’s artists - Congratulations! And thank you for participating in SF+SC 2026. The work you submitted was hopeful and urgent! We hope that you continue to experiment and make sustainability a key part of your practice.
Cole Kamerick Alfelt-Eller and Chelsea Nanfelt Rowe
AWARD WINNERS
The SF+SC Student Committee, a group of graduate students at Virginia Commonwealth University, manages the exhibition. Each year, an esteemed guest is invited by the committee to join the jury process.
Three award winners were chosen from the collection of applicants.
The Juror’s Choice: The exhibition's highest honor, recognizing exceptional artistic achievement, concept, execution, and relevance to the exhibition. This award was selected by Mary Hallam Pearse.
The Speculative Futures Award: Recognizes the work that most effectively engages the exhibition's central prompt: using jewelry, adornment, or objects to imagine alternative futures through speculative design and the question "What If?"
The Resonance Award: Awarded to work that most strongly resonates emotionally, socially, or conceptually with viewers and the exhibition's themes of care, refusal, collective making, and imagining futures. The award suggests impact and connection rather than technical excellence alone.
Prize $900
Award chosen by Guest Juror, Mary Hallam Pearse
2026 GUEST JUROR’S CHOICE
Estyn Hulbert
Artist Statement:
I am interested in transforming commonplace, overlooked, discarded materials into objects of beauty and mystery, through careful, laborious attention. So many objects pass through our hands in an endless stream towards the landfill — how do we create meaning and a sense of safety in the midst of overwhelming consumption and waste? Redefining preciousness, beauty, and value is a radical act.
The experience of wearing Sound Hood is one of being buffered, safely cocooned, and your own voice altered. Touching the surface of the hood creates gentle sounds like rain falling on a tin roof. The cone surrounding your face limits the visual field, shrinking it to a manageable size.
Ball Chain Collar also provides comfort. The neckpiece functions as a wearable weighted blanket, reminding the wearer to return to their body, to drop their shoulders, to breathe.
Responsibility Statement:
I am drawn to use objects that are considered trash, such as aluminum cat food cans, plastic milk carton lids, and used wooden popsicle sticks.
Last semester, the SUNY New Paltz Metal Department participated in Radical Jewelry Makeover. Digging through the materials, I found myself attracted to a tangled mess of vintage deadstock costume chains, still with their $12.50 price labels, and to several bags of brass ball chains. These are the materials I worked with, spending hours untangling and cleaning the chains and exploring ways to work with them, inspired by my research into weaving and basketry.
I have always been attracted to art that uses found or discarded materials, but I had not found an authentic way to incorporate them into my own work. Participating in Radical Jewelry Makeover helped me discover a new way to engage with non-traditional materials.
Resonance Award
Prize: $400
Award chosen by all Jurors
Roni Litay
Artist Statement:
Driven by a deep sense of responsibility and a desire for change, I have spent years exploring the impact of human activity on the environment. After prolonged exposure to articles, reports, and documentaries, I could no longer ignore the consequences of our actions. I chose to enter the world of fashion and jewelry—one of the three most polluting industries—not only out of a love for design, but also from a sense of purpose.
My graduation project (Living Alloy) presents a material research journey that spanned over two years, centered around the development of a new material derived from brown seaweed. Using techniques inspired by the culinary world, I created diverse sheets with varying properties from the Alginate mixture, offering a sustainable alternative to harmful materials and processes. This project is a sincere attempt to challenge industry norms and imagine a more conscious, sustainable, and responsible future. The collection includes necklaces and earrings made from the materials I developed, combined with Sterling Silver links and dried plants from my garden.
Responsibility Statement:
I contribute to a more sustainable future in jewelry and metalsmithing by rethinking both materiality and the relationship between the body and the natural world. My practice focuses on developing bio-based materials derived from natural substances such as algae, creating alternatives that challenge the dominance of mined and industrial resources.
Rather than imitating conventional materials, I embrace the unique qualities of these living-inspired substances—their softness, impermanence, and organic behavior. This approach shifts the value of jewelry from permanence and extraction toward ephemerality, sensitivity, and ecological awareness.
My work also aims to reconnect the wearer with nature. By incorporating botanical elements and tactile, body-responsive forms, I encourage a more conscious and intimate engagement with the environment.
Speculative Futures Award
Prize: $400
Award chosen by all Jurors
Larissa McPherson
Artist Statement:
My work explores the accumulation of microplastics and waste in the environment, particularly within animal bodies. It envisions how microplastics invasion might manifest visually in the bones animals leave behind. Using found plastics, bones, and 3D printing technology, I engage with the unique properties of each material and process, discovering how they intertwine. Found plastic degrades and weaves its way through organic structures, plastic film coats surfaces, and printed plastic accumulates into new forms. This work emerges from an extensive breadth of research spanning animal materials and their symbolism, the existence and broader conceptual implications of plastic waste, environmental concerns, and the use of fictional narratives to address real ecological crises. Designed to reside on and interact with the human body, the jewelry I create serves as a tool to bridge the plastic invasion of non-human bodies with the parallel invasion occurring within human bodies.
Responsibility Statement:
Sustainability and waste-reduction is at the forefront of my practice. I scavenge for bones and plastic waste along road sides, dump sites, and hiking trails to create a collection I can pull from in the studio. I also spend time in natural history museum collections, taking scans of animal bones and altering them in 3D software for printing in biodegradable PLA. I intentionally use all parts of 3D print including supports in my work, and any scraps are reserved for local PLA composting. Spray paint is used as well, purchased locally, and then disposed of in the local hazardous waste disposal site. Metal used in some of my works is sourced from a mix of new metal from Rio Grande, and scrap metal from prior projects and the UGA student studio scrap bins. My newer work features less metal, and has moved towards using alternative found materials to limit metal consumption.
Introducing the
So Fresh + So Clean 2026 Student Exhibition!
VIEWING TIPS
To enlarge, click on a thumbnail image, and hover over the image to view additional text.
When viewing from a phone, notice a small dot in the lower corner on individual images, this will bring up additional text.
We celebrate the significant impact students have, amplifying their voices in an effort to shift the contemporary conversation.
We challenge you to investigate your studio, processes, methods, and personal goals. Tell us about it, ask questions, and then show us the work you are making!
Thank you to our So Fresh + So Clean Sponsors!
So Fresh + So Clean 2026 JURORS
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Mary Hallam Pearse received her M.F.A. in Metal from SUNY New Paltz and a B.F.A. in Crafts with an emphasis in Jewelry and Metals from Kent State University. Her practice centers around the symbolic and emotive resonance of jewelry and potent materials and how they participate in culture. Shifting scale, moving from image to object to material conditions, her work dramatically changes directions prompted by life events. Pearse’s work has been selected for competitive exhibitions in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally and included in publications such as Metalsmith, Ornament and American Craft. Curatorial projects include Crafting History: Textiles, Metals and Ceramics at the University of Georgia, Parallels: Jonathan Wahl and Sondra Sherman, The Ring Shows: Then & Now and Putting the Band Back Together and Coming into View. She has been invited to present lectures and provide workshops at Penland, Anderson Ranch, Kent State University, East Carolina University and Humboldt State to name a few. She is currently professor of the jewelry and metalwork and Associate Director of Space and Technology at The Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens, Georgia.
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Chelsea Nanfelt Rowe (b. 1993, Maine) is an artist and jeweler investigating the relationships between people and the materials they interact with through wearable objects. Nanfelt Rowe earned her MFA in Craft + Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently resides in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she works remotely at SNAG (Society of North American Goldsmiths) and as an educator.
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Cole Kamerick Alfelt-Eller is a Jeweler, Craftsperson, and Artist. Currently based out of Richmond, Virginia, Cole comes from a semi-rural upbringing in Michigan. While their practice is based in metalsmithing and jewelry-making, Cole uses a variety of media to create work that explores material agency, the politics of the body, divine ritual, and jewelry as a means of transmutation. Cole has worked in the jewelry industry as a bench jeweler and earned their BFA in Craft and Material Studies from College for Creative Studies (Detroit, MI) in 2023. They received their MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA) in 2026. Cole has curated exhibitions, including So Fresh + So Clean for the Community for Ethical Jewelry and Offerings: What Metal Can Do for the Barbershop Art and Book Gallery. Cole is an exhibiting artist, showing work at Scarab Club Detroit, Wayne State Galleries, Detroit Contemporary, and NYC Jewelry Week. Cole was most recently awarded the Post-Master's Teaching Fellowship by Virginia Commonwealth University.
So Fresh + So Clean is powered by our Student Committee
The Student Committee mission is to examine what it means to be an artist in the 21st century by curating the most innovative jewelry and metalsmithing that challenges the political and environmental implications of our field.
We understand a 100% sustainable practice is an unachievable goal.
But, how close can we get?
The first step is becoming aware of the ways your work impacts environmental and human health, hopefully affecting the creative decision making of artists. Becoming a member of the Community for Ethical Jewelry is one small step that places you within this essential dialogue, and your membership fee helps our non-profit organization to continue to make a difference!