Dear Ornamentt Reader,

We inhabit a perpetually changing universe that has been touched everywhere by nature’s sublime beauty. For planet Earth, transformation is marked each year through its distinct but inextricably linked four seasons, those recognizable expressions of the forever-turning wheel of life. It is no surprise that nature’s foremost season is mostly described as breathtaking. Exquisitely nuanced, spring’s dawning is so astonishing. From some deep primordial memory, we eagerly look forward, with a sense of excitement, with optimism and joy, at the wondrous possibilities that each bright new day will bring to refresh ourselves and others. Springtime first breathes its soft, sweet air into our sentient beings, quickening our senses; then this miraculous season sends the stimulating rain and a nourishing warmth to the earth, harbingers of new works to be made, informing us that life is here yet again, to birth itself, and to grow and flourish. Thus spring is an especially sacred time: the most erotically provocative of wellsprings, it ceaselessly draws upon our native sexual and sensual metaphors to join, to bring to fruition, to give forth, with abundance, that we might continue life and living. In the union of creation, of the coming together to make something, there is an intrinsic, undescribable purity to this vital force that overwhelms and transcends itself through its pleasurable consummation.

As beings, we create children but some of us also produce art, a most delightful and profound allegory to life itself. In the world of Ornament, whether jewelry, beads or clothing, each artist’s work is an expression of bliss, and is an attempt to distill the plentiful beauty of the world into a particular essence. Personal adornment is an art that celebrates the human form and spirit, with elegance and grace, and with motifs that range from the realistic to the abstract, the literal to symbolic. It is a transformative artform that manifests both the body and soul of the beings who wear their objects of adornment. It is also the most sensual of arts, excited by and responding to the human form, decorated still with a paganistic relish in this twenty-first century. It is a loving, lively art filled with passion and ecstasy and, like springtime, charged with the most seductive of wellsprings, nature’s sublime beauty.