Tag Archive for 'process'

Seven years ago, with the fall quickly becoming winter in manhattan, I went to a place called Dikra in midtown and purchased a few cabochons for my jewelry class. I used two out of the three, and while having great plans to set the third stone, time flew, the semester was up, and I never finished that piece.

This weekend I finally set this turquoise-blue amazonite stone:

Throughout the process my mind was flooded with memories of where that stone had been that year, of the plans I had to set it (numerous and I never settled quite fully on one), the people I knew then, the places I went with them, and in the end of all that, I abandoned the stone…it stayed with me in the recesses of my house, piled with the other neglected art projects that I am now excavating and expanding on.

I never expected working again on this stone to create such an intense sense of time travel. It really could have been 2002 in that room when I burnished the stone in place (Burnishing by the way has become one of my favorite processes in jewelry-making. It takes a lot of muscle and focus to get a sweet, smooth line around the stone. In class my nickname became "the Burnisher" set to the tune of the end of Big Punisher's "Still Not a Player"  around min. 3:12 …burnishaaaa)

And after that incredibly cathartic experience, another creative process began. Elise, a fellow Crucible hooligan, was in the two-day intensive workshop with me. She and I fell into that kind of talk that issues from nowhere while you aren’t looking at each other, but focused on the file that is shaving off atoms of silver before you. She was soldering gemstone eyes onto a metal dental mold (an octopus form of sorts), and I ended up working on this ring:

I can’t recount all that went into this piece, but I will say that I didn’t go into the workshop with this form in mind. To see it now after having gone through the process of creating it is surprising even to me. I’m definitely loving the adventure. (The stone is glass, by the way, and it is even more intense in person. And no, that psychedelic patina color won’t last forever. The patina will eventually go darker black, but hey, I can dig rainbows as long as they last!)