About

Dutch artist Judith Haas creates jewelry and fine art using gold, silver and copper alloys. Her work is characterized by finely crafted textures and unfinished surfaces in contrast with colorful patinas that reflect her passion for art and design history and the industrial environment surrounding her Williamsburg Studio.

 

Bio

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Judith Haas now lives and works in New York.

After completing a Master of Science in Human Movement Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, she moved to New York, where she worked as a clinical exercise physiologist for several years at a cardiopulmonary rehabilitation center in Manhattan. Inspired by the cultural life of the city, she gradually transitioned into jewelry design and metal smithing. While continuing her clinical work during the day, she trained in the evenings at the Fashion Institute of Technology and at Project 174 in Brooklyn.

Her work found an audience early on, selling through boutiques, galleries, and department stores such as Harvey Nichols Hong Kong and Hankyu Japan. Building on this success, she has since expanded her practice to larger works in metal, drawing on the same techniques and tools she first developed through jewelry making.

 

Artist Statement

Urban environments lie at the center of her practice, in particular how they evolve over time, and how nature quietly intervenes, alters, and ultimately reclaims human-made structures. She approaches the city not as a fixed backdrop but as shared ground, a terrain we collectively rewild into ecological resilience, where moss settles into the seams of concrete, vines ascend chain-link fences, and rust gradually rewrites the surface of steel. These incremental acts of reclamation suggest a broader proposition: that rewilding is not solely a practice directed toward remote landscapes, but a process already underway within the urban fabric itself, in vacant lots, neglected rooftops, fractured sidewalks, and the overlooked margins of infrastructure.

By setting the rigid grids of human infrastructure against the organic decay of rust and patina, she constructs a visual dialogue between control and chance. Grids, lines, and modular forms reference infrastructure, networks, and human order, while corrosion and organic textures evoke time, decay, and natural regrowth, articulating metaphors for social and ecological relationships, and for the porous threshold between what we build and what eventually grows back through it.

Drawing on the idealism of early twentieth-century European abstract modernism, while grounding her work in the weathered industrial materials of contemporary cities, she considers these relationships as ongoing negotiations between progress and impermanence, and as quiet invitations to reconceive the city as a living, regenerating ecosystem of which we are part, rather than apart.