About Elaine Chong

I make objects that hold presence.

We all have objects and rituals that become part of our everyday lives. A lamp gets relit every morning. Marigolds are strung fresh. A favorite mug finds its way into the same hand every day. The first time you reach for it without thinking, it is already yours.

I am a jewelry designer and painter with an MFA from Montclair State University. My artwork has been exhibited nationally, with my jewelry work featured in JCK and National Jeweler. Painting and jewelry have always fed each other. The color in a painting becomes the enamel in a pendant. A symbol on a canvas becomes the motif on a ring. One studio. Two practices. Everything connected.

My work often begins far from the studio, in the markets of India, the workshops of Morocco, in conversations with makers, and in materials that have carried meaning into objects for centuries. I bring these discoveries home to Summit, New Jersey, where they become part of an ongoing process of collecting, translating, and making.

The studio is a place for that process to unfold. Work in progress sits alongside finished pieces. Tools and materials wait to be activated. Ideas live on a pin board, some resolved and others not yet decided. There are pieces that did not work, kept because there is usually something in them still waiting.

Every piece is rooted in ritual: the repeated mark, the object worn close to the body, the meaning carried quietly over time. A stone sits differently than the last one. A color, enamel or paint, is never mixed the same way twice, not even by me, not even on purpose.

And once a piece leaves the studio, its meaning is no longer mine to decide. It becomes part of someone else's story, shaped by where it goes, how it is worn or lived with, and what it comes to hold over time.