At her off-campus studio, Demi Thomloudis is making her own family heirlooms.
Part of a jewelry project titled “New HeirLooms,” they are a collection near to her heart. She drew inspiration from childhood summers spent visiting her father’s family in Greece, where she connected with faraway cousins and relatives. While she cherishes the memories, the distance also created a lack of family keepsakes to pass down to the next generation.
As a former bench jeweler and now associate professor and area chair of jewelry and metalwork in the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, Thomloudis took it upon herself to create her own heirlooms, inspired by small details of her grandparents’ apartment in Greece.
“New HeirLooms” is just one example of how she takes environments and turns them into wearable art. She sees it as “flipping the script” on spaces—instead of inhabiting a certain space, she scales down its specific elements—perhaps a kitchen’s tile, or the steel bones of a building—and turns them into adornments that inhabit the body itself.
“Jewelry is something that is inherently linked to identity, like wedding rings or religious necklaces,” said Thomloudis, who was so fascinated by anatomy and the human body that at one point she intended to become a medical illustrator. “Place is also something that we link to identity as human beings, and I’m interested in how we can put those two things together—jewelry and place.”
“New HeirLooms” will be displayed in a special solo exhibit at the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, in summer 2027.