Carved from a small branch of cherry wood from her own backyard, this brooch expresses the reach and bend of life. The form seems endowed with human qualities. Diamonds punctuate the form like beauty marks, and rings of silver move with the wearer.
Church discovered jewelry at Skidmore College in the late 1960s. Captivated by women working with fire and molten metal, she felt an urgent pull toward the elemental, Promethean power of metalworking. After a brief stint as a legal secretary, she pursued graduate studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She began teaching at Skidmore before joining the Philadelphia College of Art (later the University of the Arts) in 1979, where she taught for thirty-five years.
Throughout her career, Church maintained an unwavering standard: she never considered a piece finished until no aspect of it troubled her. This philosophy shaped both her own acclaimed work and her teaching, earning her numerous prestigious awards and establishing her as an influential figure in contemporary jewelry. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Woodmere, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and many others.
