Storage as an active condition

Jewellery in Storage is a public participatory archive documenting the everyday, artistic, and professional practices through which jewellery is kept.

Jewellery is often understood through its relationship with the body. Wearing, movement, and visual display are frequently treated as the primary conditions shaping how jewellery is experienced, interpreted, and valued. However, for much of its lifetime, jewellery is neither worn nor displayed. 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. This project questions this assumption by considering storage as an active narrative practice through which meanings may be preserved, transformed, or generated.

By bringing together experiences of jewellery storage across everyday life, artistic practice, and professional care, the archive invites us to consider what storage does to jewellery and what jewellery asks of storage.

This project forms part of Yaning Liu’s PhD research at the University of Edinburgh. The research aims to develop storage as an active design condition within contemporary jewellery practice and to examine how this approach may extend jewellery’s narrative life beyond wearing and display.