24 September 2026
Artist Highlight - Chancy Pan
Interview and Review
Chancy Pan is a London-based jewellery designer currently studying at the Royal College of Art. Her practice explores the emotional and cultural value embedded in everyday materials, with a focus on waste, repair, and behavioural change. Through material experimentation, she transforms overlooked substances into objects that invite reflection on care, consumption, and attachment.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. Precious Waste imagines a world where cherishing food is rewarded with the highest honour. What made you want to connect food waste with status and recognition?
As food has become increasingly accessible, wasting it has gradually become normalised. At university, I was often struck by the sight of untouched food being thrown into canteen waste bins. Watching this happen repeatedly felt heartbreaking and helpless. I found this shift in attitude worth questioning and began to imagine a world in which those who cherish food are awarded the highest honour. Using the visual language of crowns, badges, and ceremonial regalia, the project exaggerates this idea, encouraging people to rethink the value of food and our attitudes towards waste.
2. Your materials include fish bone, chicken bone, shell, rice, pearl and bio plastic. How did you choose which forms of waste could become jewellery?
I did not choose these materials because they were naturally suited to jewellery. Instead, I was interested in their close relationship to food consumption and waste. Fish bones, chicken bones, rice, and shells all carry traces of having been eaten, used, or discarded. I wanted to preserve this connection to food while exploring their potential as jewellery materials. When these overlooked remnants are placed within objects associated with honour and value, they begin to take on new meanings, creating a dialogue between what is discarded and what is celebrated.
3. Food is intimate, ordinary and temporary, while jewellery often carries permanence and value. How do those two worlds meet in this collection?
I see both food and jewellery as being closely connected to ideas of value, but they exist at opposite ends of that spectrum. Food is temporary; it is produced, consumed, and quickly disappears. Jewellery, on the other hand, is often preserved, treasured, and passed down through generations. By transforming food waste into jewellery, I bring these two worlds together. Materials that would normally be discarded are given a longer presence, while jewellery becomes a medium through which the overlooked value of food can be reconsidered and remembered.
4. The pieces seem to ask whether value is cultural, material or emotional. Where do you think value begins in this project?
I think value begins with culture in this project. Crowns, badges, and ceremonial objects are not inherently valuable because of their materials; they become valuable because society associates them with honour, status, and recognition. In the same way, food waste is often perceived as worthless through cultural habits and assumptions. By bringing these two seemingly opposite worlds together, I wanted to highlight how value is constructed rather than fixed. The project suggests that what we consider precious or disposable is shaped not only by material qualities but also by cultural meanings and personal experiences.
5. Food waste is usually hidden quickly after a meal. What happens when it is slowed down, cleaned, shaped and displayed?
Food waste is usually removed and forgotten almost immediately after a meal, leaving little opportunity to reflect on it. By slowing this process down, cleaning, shaping, and displaying these materials, they become objects of attention rather than things to be overlooked. Their origin does not change, but our relationship to them does. I am interested in how this shift creates space for reflection, allowing viewers to reconsider food waste not simply as a discarded by-product, but as something that can reveal broader questions about value, consumption, and what we choose to notice or ignore.
6. After seeing Precious Waste, what would you like people to reconsider the next time they throw food away?
I hope people become more aware of the value of food in their everyday lives. Food waste is often removed and forgotten very quickly, leaving little room for reflection. If this project encourages people to pause, look again, and think a little more carefully about what is being discarded, then it has achieved what I hoped for.
WHAT DESERVES A MEDAL
Review by Sara Chyan, Curator
Chancy Pan gives leftovers the treatment normally reserved for honours. In Precious Waste, fish bones, chicken bones, shells and other remains from eating are turned into badges, a crown and an oversized ruff. Worn against a black jacket, the collection looks almost like an invented ceremonial uniform.
The brooches are the part I find most interesting. Some of the materials are still immediately recognisable. A fish spine runs beneath one badge, a small bone sits almost untouched in another, and a shell keeps its familiar shape. They have been cleaned and carefully presented, but they have not been transformed so completely that their previous use disappears.
That feels important because Chancy’s idea is deliberately simple. She began the project after repeatedly seeing untouched food thrown away at university and imagined a society where caring about food would be rewarded with the highest honour. Medals and crowns make that reversal very easy to understand.
There is humour in taking the idea this far. The crown, large collar and formal styling are almost excessive, which stops the work from becoming a lecture about food waste. The wearer looks decorated for an achievement that does not yet exist.
At the same time, I think the collection becomes less convincing when the waste looks too beautiful. The amber coloured ruff photographs almost like a luxury accessory, and it would be easy to admire the finish before thinking about what the material represents. I prefer the badges where the bone or shell remains obvious. There is still a slight awkwardness in looking at something that would normally have been cleared from a plate.
One medal carries the words What’s Left Behind. It is unusually direct, but it fits the project. Chancy is less interested in inventing a completely new material than in changing the amount of attention we give to something after it has been used.
The honours themselves are useful here because their value also depends on agreement. A medal matters because we have decided what it stands for. Chancy applies the same logic to waste and asks why one object is carefully kept while another is removed without a second thought.
I do not think Precious Waste needs to prove that leftovers are precious. It is more interesting as a question about how quickly we decide what deserves care.