Chatelaine

MELLITUS

In my chatelaine dedicated to Don Tompkins and Banting & Best, I transform the traditional tool-belt into both a tribute and a testament to care, much like a courtier in a vast palace who carries every key and tool at her waist to avoid retracing her steps. Crafted from polished sterling silver, this piece suspends tiny glass “vial” pendants alongside miniature insulin syringes, lancets, and calibrated droplet gauges—charms that speak to the rituals of diabetes management as much as to the rituals of the hearth. At its center, I’ve set a low-relief portrait of Tompkins on the clasp, and I’ve engraved a delicate disc to honor Banting and Best’s landmark 1921 isolation of insulin.

But I didn’t stop at silver alone. I’ve integrated a bright-red emergency kit shell—its plastic “FLIP OFF” lid a playful nod to the cap on every new insulin vial and to Don Tompkins’s 1971 Banting & Best pendant. When closed, the case wears like a jewel: one panel swept by the white “Lilly” logo, the other stamped with my “DB” monogram. Flip it open, and you discover a U-40 syringe marked “USE U-40 ONLY” nestled alongside two numbered lancet plungers—their ribbed, cell-like handles transformed into talismanic charms.

By weaving together instruments of domestic utility, precious metals, and the apparatus of biomedical intervention, I invite viewers to carry with me the tools needed to “rescue” myself at a moment’s notice—and to rethink caregiving as an act of both personal labor and collective liberation. When this chatelaine rests at the waist, it becomes a constellation of lived experience—each charm a story of resilience, each link a reminder of the tools that shape our autonomy. Within “Challenging the Chatelaine” at the Design Museum Helsinki (2006), curated by Helen Drutt.