Adornments & Delights

 

jewelry arts

 

 

Nature has been a constant source of inspiration for makers of ornaments since ancient times. Casting about for design ideas, artists and artisans have turned to natural forms: the sinuous curl of a vine, a leopard’s spots, the humble acorn, a chrysanthemum blossom. These shapes are transformed into jewelry that often carries the animation and resonance of its subjects.

Through June 16, 2013, the exhibition “Adornments & Delights: Five Jewelers Courting Nature” at the Fuller Craft Museum highlights the ongoing connection between ornament and the natural world. The work of the Massachusetts-based jewelers featured in the show romances, as it were, nature by diverse and engaging means, including materials..

The exhibition offers a kind of “overture” display case where a single work by each of the five artists is presented—where the “courting” begins. Here the duo of Mary Hughes and Caro-Gray Bosca from Gloucester offers their “Star Fruit” necklace, a 2012 piece whose elements echo the distinctive ellipsoid shapes of the fruit of the Averrhoa carambola tree (which, when cut on the cross-section, creates a star shape, hence its name). The artists turned to Pinctada shells to lend a nacreous shine to the piece and simulate the fruit’s smooth surface.

Other pieces by Hughes and Bosca feature a wide variety of materials, from Baltic amber and burlwood to yellow sapphire and sterling silver—not to mention their bread and butter as master goldsmiths, eighteen- and twenty-two-karat gold. In the nature-based vein, the “Power of the Flower” ring and its complementary “Power of the Flower” earrings, both 2013, are circular designs, combining Baltic amber, CT natural yellow sapphire, eighteen karat gold and oxidized sterling silver. They have an antique look to them, like vintage pieces from an earlier age—a curious mix of Victorian and 1960s.

Other pieces by Hughes and Bosca feature a wide variety of materials, from Baltic amber and burlwood to yellow sapphire and sterling silver—not to mention their bread and butter as master goldsmiths, eighteen- and twenty-two-karat gold. In the nature-based vein, the “Power of the Flower” ring and its complementary “Power of the Flower” earrings, both 2013, are circular designs, combining Baltic amber, CT natural yellow sapphire, eighteen karat gold and oxidized sterling silver. They have an antique look to them, like vintage pieces from an earlier age—a curious mix of Victorian and 1960s.

Other pieces by Hughes and Bosca feature a wide variety of materials, from Baltic amber and burlwood to yellow sapphire and sterling silver—not to mention their bread and butter as master goldsmiths, eighteen- and twenty-two-karat gold. In the nature-based vein, the “Power of the Flower” ring and its complementary “Power of the Flower” earrings, both 2013, are circular designs, combining Baltic amber, CT natural yellow sapphire, eighteen karat gold and oxidized sterling silver. They have an antique look to them, like vintage pieces from an earlier age—a curious mix of Victorian and 1960s.

The connection to nature is not constant; in the case of each featured artist, the exhibition serves as an occasion to showcase work that stands outside that thematic line. For Susan Hamlet from New Bedford the work displayed includes hollowware pieces from the late 1980s and 1990s as well as a generous selection of her sterling silver necklaces and brooches from the last dozen years or so.

A number of Hamlet’s pieces play on the charm bracelet design. The necklaces “Cascade” and “Free Fall,“ both 1997, consist of assortments of tiny objects: birds, leaves, a knife, a ladder, a telescope. Hamlet is a master miniaturist: smaller than Monopoly pieces, her charms are fabricated and cast with remarkable precision. She notes that she strives to convey a sense of “sensory overload” in these neckpieces, inspired by “the burgeoning degree of information and images we are experiencing.”

Hamlet contributes to the nature theme through several pieces that evoke trees. Her “Winter Branches,” 2012, is a simple and stunning sterling silver collar fit for an ice queen attending a winter ball. Elsewhere, “Arch,” an eighteen karat brooch from 2006, evokes a clearing in the woods—and a pathway into another world. In both instances the arboreal elements are stylized in a manner that recalls the iconic trees of the late painter Will Barnet.

Claire Sanford, another Gloucesterite, also turns to trees for inspiration. Her 2013 suite of leaf and branch brooches are made from cedar, pine and oxidized silver. Each brooch consists of sanded pieces of wood encircled and intersected by bands of silver. The overall shape is simple yet the inventive arrangement of the bits of inlaid wood and their different grain patterns are engaging (individual pieces brought to mind some of the surrealist images of René Magritte).

Sanford’s “Verticil” and “Madeline’s Heart” series are equally arresting in their simplicity. The title of the former grouping refers to the circular configuration of each piece: four narrow evenly-spaced propeller-like petals made from copper, brass and sterling silver. The latter series was inspired by drawings by a relative’s young daughter. Each drawing included a loose rendering of a heart, which Sanford transposed into abstract-organic shapes made of oxidized sterling silver combined with cedar, epoxy, pine needles and pollen, and other materials.

In her statement Sanford references growing up the daughter of a botanist in Hawaii. Included in the exhibition are two pieces from her series “Omaka” (Hawaiian for spring or water source), each a tall and narrow patinated copper vessel with smooth cedar branch handles. One envisions these stately objects serving as the drinking goblets of modern gods.

For Linda Kindler Priest, nature is the basis for everything she creates. Her signature work, mainly two-part brooches, consists of a creature—bird, beast, fish, insect—rendered by way of repoussé in fourteen karat gold (and occasionally silver). These fauna are juxtaposed with gemstones—agate, tourmaline, crystal, jasper—the whole accented with tiny sapphires and diamonds. While the two parts are meant to complement each other, they can be worn separately, “as strong individual statements,” notes the artist.

Priest’s “Woolly Mammoth” brooch, 2009, is a delightful tribute to the extinct mammal with its tusks and great curling trunk—at the tip of which glints a brown diamond. The gray of the sculpted animal relief contrasts with its “pedestal,” a vertical piece of petrified ivory dotted with seventy-four-point sapphires.

The artist’s menagerie in this show includes giraffe, dragonfly, hippo, and hummingbird. Occasionally, an ornament will carry an environmental message. “Fish in Troubled Water,” 2011, is a handsome bracelet featuring a repoussé gold fish attached to a cuff in oxidized silver. One senses that the darker metal represents our polluted waterways through which the hapless finned creature swims.

The theme of nature is carried over into a remarkable installation by the ceramics artist Linda Huey from Boston and Alfred, New York. “Dark Garden” consists of forty clay plants, some of them as tall as nine feet, arranged in four groupings in a courtyard-like gallery at the Fuller. Mixed in with them is the detritus of modern society—plastic water bottles, computer parts, toy cars, and garden gnomes—a kind of environmental Little Shop of Horrors.

“What power does art have against the demands of seven billion people, never mind greed and politics?” asks critic Christine Temin in an essay for the Huey show. In the ceramist’s case, the power comes from the awareness she raises of the degradation of our “garden.” As for the five jewelers in “Adornments & Delights,” they reconnect us to nature in a manner that often goes beyond the design of a stunning ornament.

by Carl Little
issue 36.3

 

 

 

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