When the pandemic was in full swing in March, April, and May of 2020, the Baltimore Jewelry Center where I work began having weekly check-ins for people who studied and made jewelry there. We shared what we were working on and responded to weekly challenges. One of them was to create a still life with our jewelry.
This was a revelatory assignment for me. At first, I organized my jewelry into sections. Jewelry that belonged to friends who died. Jewelry I got on vacations. Really old jewelry You get the idea. It made a pretty cluttered gathering.
Then, slowly, I went back through the collection and started weeding out what didn’t seem essential, looking for the jewelry that touched my heart. I weeded out the rest.
I added an African statue I bought in Uganda, which, since I play the clarinet, in a sense stands for my soul’s presence among these speaking objects. I included a Cherokee pot I bought from its maker, a woman who lives in Oklahoma – so her ancestors must have survived the Trail of Tears from my childhood home, North Carolina. It speaks of courage and survival and bears a symbol that to me communicates both a sense of eternity and the presence of life within eternity.
Much of the jewelry that remained comes from ancient traditions. Near the bottom is a Navajo dragonfly, a symbol of (among other things) water and renewal, and also a reminder of a deceased friend. Nearby is a fish that was once a brooch for an ancient Roman’s cape. A Jewish Berber necklace, bought in Morocco, lies to the left of the pot. To the right, a beautiful Manaia, a Maori symbol created by a Tahitian craftsman from fossilized whalebone (and bought in Hawaii to be brought home to Maryland). To some, this beautiful pendant, a combination of bird and fish and human, confers protection on air or ground or sea. For me, it is a reminder of wholeness and unity of self.
I don’t have a wish to copy any of these. But everything that touches my heart so deeply is part of the deep well from which the best of my work emerges. I can’t always name a source and see exactly what it contributed to a piece, any more than the German band can be extracted from New Orleans jazz, now so clearly and joyfully its own sound.
The photograph, by the way, is transformed using an app called Brushwork. I find it a little frustrating to use, but it is certainly powerful.