Hello Kitty Friendship Necklace

Maker unknown, ca. 2008

Stainless steel

Dimensions variable

Gifted by Nicola Tourangeau

Personal collection

This object is a friendship necklace that I received at around the age of eight, as a gift from a friend. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about the object itself – it is one of many similar pieces of ‘friendship’ jewelry that were given to me throughout my childhood. As I grew up, I threw away most of these pieces, but this one stuck around for some reason. It is likely that I kept this particular necklace because it was given to me by a friend with whom I had a genuinely meaningful connection, despite the fact that we have grown apart with age.

Despite its simplicity, it speaks to something fundamental about human nature and our desire to make lasting connections. Every human being has a basic urge to feel that they belong – though we may not realize this when we are young, it is a necessity of human existence. While connections of friendship, family, and love are essential and transformative, they can also be fleeting. Simple objects like this are a testament to the fact that from an early age we seek to create tangible representations of that which we know is intangible, and potentially fleeting. The objects that I chose to include in our museum are both representations of friendship. This particular object is representative of my past conception of friendship, but what is so interesting about it is that it is really just a simpler and less fully realized version of how I continue to understand friendship today.

My friendship locket takes on a more complex meaning in light of the pandemic that the world is currently being faced with. One of the reasons why many people seem to be struggling right now is that without the possibility of representation through the physical, we have to rethink the way we express and understand connectedness and belonging. The desire to represent this through objects as a means to make things feel more real is not something we grow out of after childhood – the difficulties associated with our present time are proof of this. I hope that this simple object will serve to incite reflection on the essential nature of friendship, and provide an opportunity to imagine new ways of representing important intangible connections in a time where the tangible is becoming increasingly limited.

Hannah Stewart