Nikki Couppee Volume 45.3
NIKKI COUPPEE
Glamorous Seaside Sparkles of Nostalgia
XL NEOGEM EARRINGS of found objects, resin, sterling silver, fine silver, brass, acrylic, faux pearls, laminate, faux silver and gold foil, and plastic gems, 2020. Model: Jesafa Banks. Photographed by Janelle Olson. ABALONE NECKLACE of acrylic, brass, resin, laminate, and nickel, 58.4 x 4.4 x 0.6 centimeters, 2024. Currently at Gallery Lulo, Healdsburg, California. NIKKI COUPPEE at her studio in Berkeley, California, 2024. Photographs by the artist unless otherwise noted. ROMANCE WAS BORN PHOTOSHOOT, showing Emerald Earrings, Australian Fashion Week, 2021. Photograph by Daniel Boud.
HOLOGEM NECKLACE WITH MULTI GEM CHAIN of brass, acrylic, resin, paper, and plastic gems, 57.2 x 7.6 x 0.6 centimeters, currently at Gallery Lulo, Healdsburg, California.
For Nikki Couppee, the aesthetics of childhood nostalgia and touristy kitsch are the same thing. She grew up on Pensacola Beach, part of a barrier island in the Florida panhandle, and though now happily situated in Oakland, California, admits, “I can’t take the Florida out of me. I love color and I’m always drawn to the most colorful, sparkly things.” The white sands, emerald waters, and neon-drenched souvenir shops of the Gulf Coast were her formative environment. “My area to roam was tourist associated—beach life, eating donuts from the hotels in the morning, swimming in their pools, shopping at the boardwalk, airbrush, all the flashy stuff of a vacation spot, it was fun!” This riot of sun-drenched sensory input informs her jewelry today. She works—often on a grand scale—with faceted acrylic, shells and a glittering assortment of plastic trinkets that remind her of home.
Another one of Couppee’s inspirations is royal jewelry—items like the Crown Jewels in London, the diamond-encrusted necklaces worn by seventeenth-century maharajas, and the remarkable Cartier creations donned by Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly. These over-the-top examples of luxury attract her, but, understandably, are inaccessible to most people. She reasoned, though, that she could make her own versions. “Because I’m using these materials that I find that are usually pretty cheap, I can blow up the size and the abundance of the stones and the scale,” generating work that provides a similar (though more affordable) sense of exuberance. Using brass as a replacement for gold and acrylic for gemstones, she makes what she considers a “fine jewelry counterpart” to the costly adornments. And while her designs share qualities with costume jewelry, each piece is unique and handmade.
Couppee’s artistic journey began at her mother’s jewelry box, where she would listen adoringly to the stories attached to each piece. From an oversized 1960s jade and sapphire cocktail ring (that her mother gifted her on her thirtieth birthday) to nineteenth-century cufflinks that belonged to her great-grandfather and were made into brooches for her mother and aunt, the precious treasures enthralled her. As a kid she made friendship bracelets and jewelry out of hemp, and created art out of materials she found in Florida, even broken bits of glass and pottery from post-hurricane debris. In high school she took advantage of the opportunity to dual enroll in the local junior college, now Pensacola State College, and began her formal metalwork studies with enamelist Douglas Resier. After receiving her associate’s degree in 2003, she went to the University of Georgia where she learned to work with steel from Rob Jackson, receiving her B.A. in 2007. UGA faculty member Mary Hallam Pearse directed her to Kent State, where she studied with Kathleen Browne and earned her master’s in 2011. “The passion they had to teach me is what kept me going. I really appreciate having such good professors.”
EMERALD NECKLACE of acrylic, brass, plastic gem, faux silver/gold foil, resin, found beach trash plastic from Brazil, and rhinestones, 38.1 x 13.3 x 0.6 centimeters, 2013.
Couppee worked with enamel for many years, making it the focus of her undergraduate degree; it gave her a strong foundation in the details of craftsmanship and remains the topic she most enjoys teaching in workshops. In graduate school, inspired by antique cut-steel jewelry, she made work with accumulations of faceted steel forms along with pieces of carved wood painted a glossy pale pink to mimic branching coral as well as mock seed pearls made of polymer clay. Next, she turned to sheets of Plexiglas, cutting and carving the acrylic to make faceted shapes that she sets in flat brass frames with pointed tabs and tiny riveted posts to hold them in place. She began with transparent acrylic, soon added colored acrylic, and then started placing faux gold and silver foils behind the acrylic.
This approach recalls both how enamelists add foil below enamels to create special effects and how, especially in eighteenth-century Europe, jewelers employed foiling to enhance the luster and color of cut gemstones—or later to improve the appearance of paste stones. Behind her acrylic forms, Couppee also uses hologram laminates with gem patterns (“like big diamond cuts”) for elements she has dubbed “neogems,” or laminates with shifting silvery rainbow sheens (like the back of a compact disc—one of her favorite emojis) for her “hologems.”
Many of Couppee’s necklaces and earrings are composed solely of these flat pieces, suggesting collections of oddly faceted slices of the most extraordinary specimens that a natural history museum could offer. (For her, a necklace of green pieces is an emerald necklace.) Other times, she creates richly layered works. A quick glance might give the impression of detritus from last night’s beach party, but the arrangements are sophisticated and thoughtful, often asymmetrical, and always delightful. When describing the elements in one corsage-style brooch, she mentions sheets of iridescent cellophane coated in resin to make them hard, plastic flowers highlighted with sparkly nail polish, glitter, faux pearls, carved acrylic, and fly-fishing materials. (She once became so intrigued by fly fishing fibers and techniques that she took a fly tying class, where she was something of a curiosity to the other participants as she had no interest in catching fish.) Other works include grids of gemstone-shaped stickers, wrapping paper (shiny, of course), miniature souvenirs, parts of costume jewelry, plastic sugar sprinkles (like on her mom’s 1960s Christmas garland), tinsel, brightly dyed deer fur, and anything else that happens to catch her eye. Some works possess organic shapes, where Couppee has embedded assorted sparkly bits into puddles of colorless resin (or sometimes, for an added delight when the lights go out, glow-in-the-dark resin). She sets her corsage-style brooches on clear rubber rectangles with steel pin mechanisms at the top (like glamorous name tag holders) that provide a safe way to handle them (the edges can be fragile) and allow their decorative backs to show through.
Couppee sources her non-traditional materials from, as she told Adriane Dalton with Art Jewelry Forum, “everywhere and anywhere: the ground, thrift shops, costume jewelry… old craft supplies” gifted by friends, and things that she cuts out of clothes and shoes. Each brings its own technical challenges. “I think almost anything is usable, I just have to figure out how to set it as a stone… so it is wearable.” She explains, “Will it be cut into bits? Formed? Used as a flash underneath the ‘stone’ and how is that going to work?” Will any coatings react to the resin or to heat? If she paints the objects—with nail polish, spray paint, iridescent powder, or, once, “mood juice (color changing ‘mood ring’ juice that changes at 72 degrees)”—how many coats will it need? She relishes the experimentation process, which keeps her designs fresh and her day-to-day experience of being a maker fulfilling. In her desire to keep everything lightweight and durable (so that it is comfortable to wear), she chooses thin acrylic and tumbles the thin pieces of brass for a long time to make them strong, a technique of work-hardening the metal.
As she explained to Dalton, “When I began working with synthetic materials, they were so bright and sparkly they reminded me a lot of toys and the details of things I enjoyed when I was little: …Troll doll hair, Lisa Frank stickers, My Little Pony, unicorns, and anything Keroppi.” She recalls playing with Barbie dolls with a friend for hours at a time, “I loved dressing her up, and I loved her accessories. I loved my [own] dress up box—it had tons of accessories. My mom would get some costume jewelry and throw it in there, and I loved it. Putting jewelry on is like the finishing touch.” She recognizes the nostalgia that the colors and textures in her work evokes in many people, adding, “I think of these like big Barbie necklaces.”
ROMANCE WAS BORN COLLABORATION WITH SCHWARZKOPF, showing Shell Earrings and Sapphire Rhinestone Earrings, Australian Fashion Week, 2021. Photograph by Daphne Nguyen.
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ROMANCE WAS BORN PHOTOSHOOT, showing Shell Earrings, Australian Fashion Week, 2021. Photograph by Daniel Boud.
Her idiosyncratic inclusion of shells, a rare organic material amidst her plastic paradise, is an important feature of her work. Sharing one of her corsage-style brooches on social media Couppee wrote, “I love making these kitschy, frozen in time, nostalgia based floral and shell brooches. I’m always homesick and making this work helps me feel connected to a time and place.” She keeps boxes of shells from Florida, always visits the shell section of the Oakland Museum of California’s annual rummage sale, and acknowledges, “I do love a good shell shop.” The shells are a tangible connection to her home—a vacation spot for most people—and once earned Couppee’s work the designation of “pop-tropical” (though, technically, the Florida panhandle is beautifully sub-tropical). With its shells and profusion of other disparate, but meaningful, materials, her work could also be considered “pop-Victorian.”
Couppee exhibits nationally and internationally; she was selected for SIERAAD International Jewelry Fair in Amsterdam in 2013, LOOT: MAD about Jewelry at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design in 2015, SCHMUCK 2018 in Munich, and Heidi Lowe Gallery’s “Earrings Galore” in 2022 and 2023. Currently (through April 6th), her work is on view at Pistachios in Chicago, in the exhibition “Altered States: Plastics Transformed” with Emiko Oye and Jennifer Merchant. Velvet da Vinci Gallery, where she used to work, in San Francisco (2016); Ombre Gallery in Cincinnati (2017 and 2018); and the Galleria Alice Floriano in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018), have presented solo shows of her work.
Couppee’s jewelry intersects easily with the fashion world, and many of the publications illustrating her work are fashion-related, including Vogue (Portugal, Czechoslovakia and Brasil), Marie Claire Australia, allure, and W Magazine. She collaborated with Australian fashion house Romance Was Born for Paris Fashion Week in 2018 and Australian Fashion Week in 2021, and with couture designer Simone Ellis of Australia for a fashion shoot in 2022. Photographs from the fashion weeks show her work (which she made especially for the events) paired with similarly conceived garments filled with color, pattern, sequins, and beads, and often composed of repurposed vintage dresses and found fabrics. The Simone Ellis outfits present complementary settings, with solid colors—of either bold velvets or yards of frothy pastels—that allow Couppee’s extravagant jewelry to pop.
Her work appeals to stylists, leading to several television appearances of her jewelry, including in a Verizon Wireless commercial in 2013, on judge Naomi Pomeroy during Season 18 of Top Chef in 2021, on judge Abbie Chatfield in The Masked Singer Australia in 2022 and 2023, and (fingers crossed!) possibly on a popular HBO Max comedy drama series later this year. Couppee enjoys seeing her work in mainstream media and appreciates the willingness of stylists to celebrate art jewelry. “It’s really cool that they chose funky art jewelry when they could have borrowed some big fine jewelry earrings, but they wanted the funky route. (Thank you!)”
During the Covid pandemic, Couppee’s mindset shifted. Now there is less travel, less hustle, but just as much sparkle. She got her own studio, separate from her house (she is glad to have the toxic dust particles away from her bedroom), and still smiles when she sees the light make the tidy little piles on her workbench twinkle (or, as she leaves, when the darkness reveals their glowing bits). She is constantly looking for new materials and the challenges and possibilities they present. Sometimes people commission her to make work incorporating heirloom (costume) jewelry, which appeals to her sentimental streak. One friend asked her to make something with a glow-in-the-dark horse, and, after she added a pointy shell to transform it into a unicorn, it became the centerpiece of a large glow-in-the-dark wall piece full of flowers, stars, fringe, and shells. Couppee’s work is, above all, fun. She fills it with colors and materials that make her happy. And, for all its uninhibited flashiness, the work she creates is grounded by her understanding of historical jewelry, sophisticated sense of composition and dedication to craftsmanship in the midst of chaos. Couppee brings us fantasies of Barbies and beaches—her “big, sparkly jewelry” evoking a refreshing aura of grown-up playtime.
SUGGESTED READING
“Brilliance: Nikki Couppee,” American Craft, Vol. 73, No. 5 (October/November 2013): pp. 48-63.
Dalton, Adriane. “Nikki Couppee: Hologems,” Art Jewelry Forum, June 6, 2016, https://artjewelryforum.org/interviews/nikki-couppee-hologems/.
Ruggiero, Ilaria. “Nikki Couppee—A Pop and Gothic Flavor,” Benchpeg, November 10, 2018, https://benchpeg.com/trends/nikki-couppee-a-pop-and-gothic-flavor.
Thompson, Sharon Elaine. “Artisan Jewelers Who Love Plastic,” Lapidary Journal, December 2015: pp. 54-57.
Vigna, Lena. “Lost and Found: Featuring Kim Alsbrooks and Nikki Couppee,” 2015, Racine Art Museum, https://www.ramart.org/wp-content/uploads/exhibitions/2015/lost-and-found/Lost-and-Found-guide.pdf.
DIAMONDS AND PEARLS of brass, copper, enamel, silver foil, gold foil, steel, cement, and wood, 11.4 x 7.6 x 2.5 centimeters, 2009. GESTURES BROOCH of enamel, copper, gold foil, sterling silver, fine silver, fine silver foil, brass, and steel, 3.8 x 3.2 x 0.6 centimeters, 2007.
Ashley Callahan is an independent scholar and curator in Athens, Georgia, with a specialty in modern and contemporary American decorative arts. She has an undergraduate degree from Sewanee and a Master’s degree in the history of American decorative arts from the Smithsonian and Parsons. Her publications include Frankie Welch’s Americana: Fashion, Scarves, and Politics (UGA Press, 2022), Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion (UGA Press, 2015), and, as coauthor, Crafting History: Textiles, Metals, and Ceramics at the University of Georgia (Georgia Museum of Art, 2018). She first was drawn to the over-the-top sparkle and flashy colors of Nikki Couppee’s jewelry, then delighted to learn about its connection to the Florida panhandle. While only a vacationer there, Callahan can appreciate Couppee’s love of that special landscape—“the beach and the colors of the water, sand, sunsets, all the different creatures, light on the water changing throughout the day—all of it!”—and likes the idea of wearing it as a necklace.
