BIO
I'm a goldsmith. Everyone usually asks what that means and that's fine.
The short version is that I can engineer almost anything from metal — gold, silver, copper, brass, platinum. If a piece needs a working hinge, I build it. If it needs a mechanism, I figure it out. My grandfather was a clocksmith and I spent a lot of time in his shop growing up. I think that's where the obsession with intricate things came from. I'm happiest working under magnification all day.
My specialty is enamel — the application of powdered glass to metal surfaces. It's one of the oldest coloring techniques in jewelry, developed long before people could reliably facet stones. Early jewelry relied heavily on enamel because it was the primary way to bring color to metal. I use the same techniques that the great jewelry houses built their legacies on.
What I'm known for is a body of work that sits somewhere between figurative sculpture and wearable object — transformer-like forms that are technically demanding, visually surprising, and completely one of a kind.
I call myself a jeweler. The work tends to do the rest of the talking.
Decker studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he received the Marzee Graduate Prize, recognizing promising international talent in jewelry, and the Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Emerging Artist Award, which provided a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The residency led directly to his first solo exhibition with Ornamentum Gallery in 2016, titled Derby and His Badges.
He lectures, teaches, and writes critically about the field. His writing has appeared in Current Obsession and Art Jewelry Forum. He was one of two writers selected for the Ruudt Peters retrospective catalogue BRON, accompanying the opening of Peters' retrospective at the CODA Museum, Apeldoorn.
Recent exhibitions include Design Miami with Ornamentum Gallery; Body Alchemy, Jewelry Triennial Hangzhou, China; Blanco and American Gothic, Munich; and the Marzee Graduate Exhibition, Nijmegen.
Represented by Ornamentum Gallery, Hudson, NY and Marzee Galerie, Nijmegen, Netherlands.