Oración Younis
Oración Younis is a jewelry artist and metalsmith based in Oakland, California. With cultural roots in Mexico and Palestine, her work blends traditional and futuristic sensibilities, blurring the boundaries of contemporary design. She is fascinated by ornamentation as a deeply human attempt to emulate the beauty of the natural world, and by extension, the divine. Her pieces inhabit a genre she calls “folk futurism”, utilizing inherited styles of adornment to forge a modern, sanctified identity.
Ora’s work addresses a conspicuous lack of traditional cultural jewelry from Palestine in the possession of her family members and friends. Noticing this gap early on, it wasn't until later that she learned about how jewelry was systematically bought from desperate, displaced Palestinian women or looted from their homes and bodies in 1948. Fueled by her family's own story of exile from her ancestral homeland, she set upon a research process. Cobbling together the stories from the surviving objects and other sources, she learned how motifs, techniques, stones, metals, forms, and numerologies all come together to from a traditional design language that she repurposes in her work. She has since dedicated herself to insisting upon the survival of Palestinian womanhood through the creation of new heirlooms to be worn in the present, combating the historicization of her people.
Some of Oración’s earliest memories of her own femininity were from times when she would play in her mother's extensive jewelry collection. Seeing her mother ornament herself with a different pair of earrings each day was critical to Ora’s early understanding of her own womanhood. In her childlike desire to be like her mother, adornment became entangled in the creation of Ora’s self concept as a trans woman. Self-beautification has become a critical step in her transition as a means to achieving acceptance, safety, and internal congruence. Adornment and the creation of jewelry has become a natural extension of this pursuit. In creating objects to adorn the body, she builds the tools required for her body to be granted access to the concept of womanhood that was passed down to me in cultural and hyper-personal spheres.
Oración began her studies in metalsmithing in 2024 at community art centers and has continued her education at the college level. She makes jewelery to adorn herself and loved ones in daily life in addition to story-telling metal art pieces.
