“How can narrative jewellery and metalwork be used to express the relationship between human and nature and ecology and create empathy with audiences in contemporary social life? How can jewellery be used as a metaphor to discuss the imbalance within the ecosystem?”

Cho Ying Ng hopes to encourage people to discuss and reflect on the topic of pollution of the ocean, threats to biological survival and destruction of the ecological balance, in a wearable installation where the instability and stretching of the worn structure constructs a story about the relationship between humans and marine ecology.

She says:“The visual narrative I tell is not an example of harmonious coexistence, but about the natural environmental outcome obtained by the mutation of the ecosystem, leading to extinction. Marine species are stripped of their lives by humans because of pollution and greed, the safety net of the ocean is stretched to a critical point and is ready to collapse, powerless to fight”.

Ng suggests the close connection between the underwater world and the need to navigate the ocean is a metaphor for globalisation. In here work objects and traces of everyday life are petrified, and the pale white of things breathes death. Rather than creating harmonious objects, the fragile, shifting jewellery warn of imminent ecosystem collapse.