Niki Ulehla’s jewelry and small puppets are about control and the illusion of it. She’s making something so fucking small that you have to pay attention, they demand you slow down and actually see them. In a world screaming at maximum volume, Niki’s working in whispers.
These aren’t just tiny baubles or pocket-sized marionettes. They’re a middle finger to the spectacle industrial complex. While everyone else is supersizing everything, making it louder, bigger, more consumable, here’s someone hunched over a workbench creating objects that might as well be secrets. Jewelry that’s also performance. Puppets that are also ornament. The categories collapse into each other like drunk strangers at 2:53 AM, and suddenly you realize the whole taxonomy was bullshit to begin with.
All that medieval mysticism about gems containing power, serpents with emerald collars, diamonds that render you invisible, it’s the same impulse that makes a tiny puppet mesmerizing. I want objects to mean something beyond themselves. I’m desperate for it. I need talismans, totems, proof that the material world isn’t just dead matter waiting to be monetized.
What strikes me is the intimacy of scale. A puppet you wear. A piece of jewelry that performs. They exist in that zone between body and exterior, between the private and the public. You wear them, they move, they catch light, they tell stories only you and whoever’s paying close enough attention can decode. That’s theater for an audience of one who happens to be you.
The craft itself is an act of rebellion. Every stitch, every wire, every minuscule gesture frozen in metal or wood is saying: complexity still matters. Detail still matters. The small and strange and labor-intensive still has a place in this algorithmic wasteland we’ve constructed.
And maybe that’s Niki’s point. In an age of infinite reproducibility, of content sludge, of everything optimized for the feed, here’s work that can only be what it is. Irreducible. Unscalable. Human.