Not surprising, then, to read Rochel’s statement and discover that she is motivated by the medicinal and the philosophical in the natural world.  She gives a nod to the medicinal for both its storied traditions and its implied references to time, “with its roots at the very beginning of human history or even before.”  The artist works with organic form the way one might work with abstract painting – to disturb the smoothness, to disturb the square – not for the sake of obliteration but to unveil further distrbutions of ordering concealed in the vitality of things a stage before their manufacture into tools.  Her pieces are not instruments or possessions, but distillations of essentials alive in the saps and flowers of her subjects.

The artist adventures across mediums in her pursuit.  When her metalsmithing strikes the chord she is after, the tone reaches ears and is picked up.  We can only hope these successes drive her further into her investigation.

Artist’s Website:  nora-rochel.de

The town is referred to as one of Mexico’s ‘magic towns’. Taxco is small city in the state of Guerrero, built near Atatzin Mountain. Its name in Nahuatl (the Aztec language) means Place of the Ballgame, referring to the spectator sport enjoyed throughout the pre-Columbian civilizations, likely played there as it was a seat for the local Aztec governor.  A silver mine, now nearly depleted, has operated continuously since that time, with the working of the metal traditionally taking place in the vicinity as well. The new town built by Cortez closer to the mine is rugged and steep, twisting roads paved with darks and light stones to form mosaics including images from the zodiac. It is a place with a continuous line into the past: despite government intervention, the locals still practice an array of local customs, including a fondness for penitent processions.  Wearing hoods they conduct various activities involving chains, rosaries with sharp spikes, thorns, whipping, or the carrying of heavy objects.  It’s said they are carried on for their affinity to the regular blood rituals of the Aztecs.

In the late 1920′s, on a recommendation from a friend at the embassy, an American named William Spratling arrived in Taxco with the express purpose of setting up a jewelry workshop to revive the native reputation for silver in the area. A renaissance man, he had practiced architecture, participated in southern literary circles counting among his friends William Faulkner, and later became a champion of Mexican artists, Diego Rivera in particular, arranging most of the important New York shows for them. Hiring a local goldsmith and using Mesoamerican design principles, Spratling’s venture in Taxco far surpassed his wildest expectations. What originally was conceived as a modest jewelry shop in a picturesque mountain town became a massive apprenticeship system drawing and training talent from throughout the region. Essentially part of the same wave of economy and popular interest that fueled Arts and Crafts and similar movements in other parts of the world, an additional boost arrived when the European war interrupted supplies and placed Mexico in the spotlight for producing luxury goods. Trying to capitalize on this Spratling made a public offering and wound up losing control of his company. Nevertheless the system held, and many of his artisans went on to found workshops and design houses of their own that remain in operation. Their work and imitations of the unique regional style developed in Taxco can be found in antique shops throughout the Americas. It is denoted by sets of full, heavy repousse work, especially cuffs and bracelets and broad expressive necklaces, or as flat patterned enamel or mosaic inlay pieces. The work runs a spectrum between modern style and direct Mesoamerican reference, and generally features elaborate maker’s and quality marks, and the town’s name.

Perhaps you have heard much about the split between craft and art.  The separate museums and galleries would seem to validate this.  The imported crafts sold in contemporary art museum gift shops seem to underline it.  Nevertheless this discussion is as droll as invoking the vaporous ‘market’ to explain the success and challenge of the individual.  Through the lens of this exhibit, we see the actuality of an artist at work, particularly an artist who is closely involved with their materials.  Personal inspiration leads to research, then curation and promotion, and the drafting of proposals that can dance between intrigue and education for the public, all to incorporate one’s artistry into this vehicle.   If this was not enough, to then take this  sweated opportunity to display command and composure by delivering craftsmanship reveals the mark of an ambition that is almost unearthly in the dry and glassy eyed world of creatives steering by mere ‘market-driven’ navigation.

Have a look the exhibit here:http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/charmed-life.  Then look closely at the jewels that serve as the peaceful eye to this artist’s storm, I hope you find them as satisfying as I did.

Seal of Roman Emperor Augustus (the Imperial “Whelping Sphinx”)

One of my favorite subjects of jewelry, the signet or intaglio ring can act like a time-capsule of personal identity.  They were once so common they are like the signatures of ghosts left to sprinkle ancient dwelling houses.  Like a stone fingerprint, like the 3-digit security code on the back of your cards, these rings were used to seal documents or sign them by pressing their mark into a patch of wax.  Their designs were usually carved intaglio into the ring’s stone, so their impressions left a raised relief design.  Later, as they fell into disuse, their metal would be melted down or reused, the little carved stones tossed aside having little value, to be discovered in abundance by archaeologists or traded endlessly as pocket curios of the Classical world.

These seals were often worn as rings, in order to conduct routine business, and are remembered today as the signet ring.  The contemporary signet frequently bears an inscription or a seal of some significance – though rarely in modern times are they a reverse imprint designed for wax, and if so purely nostalgic.  Signet rings still retain the suggestion of authority, whether a masonic ring, a class ring or a family crest,  or at its most minimal describes a heavy ring with a large flat stone.

Minoan Signet Ring

The origins of the signature seal are very ancient, many thousands of years.  Ancient Mesopotamia preferred a cylinder seal that pressed or unrolled a small vignette onto wax and clay plates.  Historians describe an ancient Babylon where not a person was without a cylinder seal on a ring or hanging around their neck.

Assortment of early seals.

In ancient Egypt, a glittering example of their characteristic design sense, scarabs served the same purpose.  A scarab, a symbol of the heart and the sun, served as one face, the other served for carved intaglio writing and was typically flat.  Perhaps this served some religious significance – there was a strong belief that one’s name, ren, was a sacred thing to be protected – maybe the rotating scarab-heart served to ‘cover’ the name.  They are so abundant each of has likely seen one.  A person can find these small signatory scarabs in any history museum, while little cast replicas in colored glass and simulated blue faience are easily found in bead shops all over the world.

Egyptian Scarab Rings

The signature stones were widespread among many cultures, from Persia to Phoenicia, Greece to Egypt, while seals in general were in use throughout the world.  Their function in business affairs create specialty shops, with gem carver being an encountered occupation in the Classics  A skilled carver’s quality and style enhances the security by being easier to authenticate visually.  The best seals were elaborate works of art, but many were cut in glass.  Roman glassmaking was at one time traded throughout the known world, including seals, introducing waves of generic counterfeits and intaglio stones that were purely decorative for trade.

Assorted Roman gold signet rings.

Silver Roman signet ring

Signet rings then can provide a more personal glimpse of economic activity that coins alone can provide.  They show that during the same period of heightened trade, a variety of amulet stones also appear, and this is where the story grows interesting.  During the syncretic time period of Alexandrian Egypt, where many cultures lived side by side, familiar cultural motifs of writing and themes of religion and myth began to take on colloquial, magical and cult themes.  We see numerous soft stones that are crudely cut with incantations, symbols that display chimeras and magic diagrams, incantations and palindromes.  There were also symbols of newly forming religions, and hybrids of converging cultures, including Christianity.  It is as though the intaglio signet had for many become a kind of personalized charm or amulet, while also serving as a statement of membership to a group.  Or it may simply be the continuation of an Egyptian customary identity.

Typical Greek-Egyptian fusion, here of Anubis and Hermes with incantations.

Early Christian Intaglio

One of the greatest mysteries of antiquity is the multitude of Alexandrian signet stones that bear the unusual word ‘abrasax’, sometimes ‘abraxas’.  Its origin remains unclear, and frequently it depicts an array of unusual characters that do not directly tie to any modern religious context.  From the inscription the word ‘Abracadabra’ still lingers, and the large numbers of these mysterious stones were scattered across the world, and into the ring fittings and curio cabinets of many fascinated admirers who had heard the legend that they bestowed supernatural powers.  Stones with this word have some of decorative art’s most mysterious characters engraved on them: a rooster headed figure with a flail and snakes for legs,  or the lion or Apollo headed snake (‘the good spirit’), or Harpocrates, the child-god of silence and secrecy, later confused with and immortalized as the common garden cherub.  Scholars group these together as Gnostic gems after a religious movement that has largely vanished from historic record.   Perhaps they relate to the legendary libraries and schools, the orpheums and museums, which were destroyed repeatedly.  The Abraxas stones are uncanny and unique, and mixed in with their contemporaries comprise such a magical pile of jewels they have attracted ages of mystique and curiosity for the time they were created.

The signet stones continued to be in use for centuries longer.  At the end of the Sassanid empire, the rule of Islam produced its own abundance of carved rings using Arabic script, which is well suited to ornamental gemstone carving.  Among these stones carnelian was especially favored from Mughal India to North Africa.  The Mughals took gemstone carving seriously, most famously with the enormous 5×4 cm ‘Moghul Emerald’.

Islamic Signet Rings

Through the middle ages elaborate seals continued to be used in by nobles and clergy but generally declined in regular trade use in the form of signet rings.  Beginning in the renaissance ancient intaglios, which were widely collected as curiosities, became an enduring fad in jewelry, strung together in necklaces, remounted in rings, and put together as ‘charm’ bracelets.  Collectors also traded plaster imprints of the stones from their elaborate cabinets.

Intaglio collection remounted

Even as professional habits and modes of expression changed, the signet ring’s mystique, suggestion of antiquity, and air of importance has retained a certain validity in use.  It lives on as the well known style of ring with its broad flat face, often still serving as a stock engraving blank or bearing a suggestive yet anonymous seal design, or a trophy of membership.

Contemporary Onyx Signet by Stephen Einhorn

The popular black onyx blank slate has its own curious place in the story, apparently inspired in some way by Victorian mourning jewelry.  It is a multi-cultural survivor carrying on a 4,000 year place among ornaments.

When an insignia is used today, etching directly into the metal is the preferred signet, leaving the lost ancient trade of cutting intaglio gemstones to be practiced strictly as a preservationist art.

Adone T Pozzobon hand engraved masonic caduceus ring

Artist’s Website:  http://www.mielmargarita.com

In artwork, the rise of science and technology was frequently paired with fanciful illustations of ancient metaphor; this neo-classical rendering was perhaps an emphasis of Newtonian triumph.  The early scientists worked under significant repression from the church, something that was freshly in mind during these times, leading to a popular sense that science had uncovered a more authentic ‘divinity of nature’.  This created a cultural connection between the wisdom of ancient, previously suppressed philosophers, their myth-making imagery, and modern progress.  A curious juxtaposition that captures the sense of excitement during a brief window in history.  The wonder of human invention would lose much of its glamour as the world wars approached.

It just makes one contemplate how things have changed. This was spurred by my mother discovering in a box of things a little gold medal I had won once for extemporaneous speaking. I admired the coarse ‘realness’ that it had compared to computer drafted engraving goods these days, and the little blank ribbon waiting for my engraved initials. As with this family of medalists, in addition to commissions for governments and institutions the artists regularly produced blank trophy items – agricultural scenes for market shows, family scenes to celebrate weddings and childbirth. These items would be hand engraved with names, inscriptions and dates. Hand engraving was an art, and a few decades before this period comprised a major part of independent jeweling.

Students graduating from the Marseille School of Decorative Arts were awarded with a medal of a woman removing her blouse ribbon.

Electricity, a common medallic theme in this time period, here celebrated with a floating nymph whose diaphanous shroud is pulled away, entangled in the new power lines.

A flowing toga on a victorious goddess is used to illustrate prudence.

I am guessing this is a brewery.

Here a goddess of progress, indicated by her Amazonian height, is showing the scientists around the labratory.

The hydroelectric dam.

Hospitals, symbolized by a goddess of health in scanty nightwear with a dish of fresh fruit.

Neptune himself attended the ceremony for stormdrain installation in Bern.

What I’ve found looking at the gold-work thus far, is that two regions that appear to have been the most exceptional, one in Costa Rica, the other in Columbia.  Gold is actually a wonderful material to work with for a tribal setting – unlike other metals, it can be hammered endlessly into a fine foil without it growing brittle and cracking.  It was used a sacred artisan supply and not as a currency.  With the Columbian work, we even have the privilege of differentiating tribal styles, and comparing them to existing tribes that have surviving comparable work.   As you might expect, the scope of distinction and style is broad and wonderful.  The Calima and Tolima work stands out as advanced as a direct result of a thriving trade system that rewarded their style.  Some have guessed that part of this dynamis results in coming from the ‘hot lands’, where the fruit is sweet and strong, the water plentiful, and the shamanic substances are particularly effective.  The gold work comes from along a river where the boulders are covered in carved glyphs for miles.  I will write more on this area of gold shortly.  For now, have a look at their marvelous renderings of rainforest life, and consider that this is but a small taste of what once was.

Dragon Triskelion

What is striking to me is the stability (standard of living) for the memorable metal artists of this time – from residency, to commission, to family and home. By contrast, a modern metal artisan may choose their trade arbitrarily out of interest, is very briefly trained at great personal expense, and is left to seek their fortune as an entrepreneur. Their skills frequently have little outlet among modern products (Peer Smed would make silverware and table services, for instance). For contemporaries the establishment of a permanent studio and a family is often delayed for a long period of time. This is not to say that every metalsmith of his day was of the calibre of Peer Smed, but one can see a distinction between a recent history of holistic cultural integration in the trade, and the literally radical and novel market based challenges today. Which is to say, an individual that understakes the approach of fine craft today, especially as an adult, is possessed of a good measure of courage.

Repousse

Repousse

Ring

Squirrel

Most of these images as you can see, are from a site that has an interesting bio page including photographs, I recommend you take a look and perhaps reflect on similar things: Peer Smed

Truth be told, the brooch has come pretty far, from its purely ornamental role today the namesake describes a typically hefty style of pin used to fasten one’s cloak or robe.  A few thousand years ago, these were more common than a pair of shoes. Not to be mistaken with a fibula, which is the exact same thing, but describes a slightly different mechanism that was favored by the Romans.  The brooch was popular among the other tribes, the Celts and such, and curiously we have opposing names for cloak pins between old enemies – empire and tribe.  We don’t use either word today for ‘fastener’, but the brooch pin does survive in a symbolic sense.  Jewelers will also be familiar with the word broach, which is a sharpened needle-like tool used to bore out the inside of rings and tubing.  It comes from the Old (Celt) French word for pin.

Here are a few images of the original brooch pins; to the sympathetic eye they provide rarified glimpses at a long and continent wide vocabulary of ornament that was largely chopped up (hacksilver is an archaeological term) and melted down by empires, invaders and inheritors.  From the looks of it, the brooches are distinct, personal items, perhaps once known for different tribal touches, or clan marks that are long gone.  At the same time, for design enthusiasts there is something peculiarly uniform,  a cultural aesthetic, that distinguishes the Celtic remnants – something like a philosophy that keeps the common thread of ornament informed, from Anatolia to Ireland. Fans of history are familiar with the mystery of this culture, who gave us many of the place-names of Europe, stories of King Arthur and Merlin, and legends of the bards travelling from tribe to tribe spreading the news in song, and the incredible survival of some of the language within the reaches of the British Isles. The old culture that used no writing left almost no record except their obsessive aesthetic of spirals and knots, an intent to abstraction that makes them all the more compelling.