about

Prima materia is an alchemical concept. It describes a universal substance from which all matter flows. Prima Materia jewelry embodies this idea of a material starting point. It presents a distinctive approach to goldwork that applies knowledge of chemistry and history to open up whole new aesthetic possibilities. 

Gold shines like the sun. Gold captures our imagination like no other metal. It is malleable and resists corrosion, seeming to last forever. Yet pure gold is an extremely soft metal, so soft as to be impractical for wear. 

This is why gold jewelry is mixed, alloyed, with other metals – for instance, with copper, silver, zinc. 

An alloy is the combination of different metals with gold to strengthen it. Alloys can also transform the nature of gold as being golden to tint it white, or pink, or green. The karat system, where 24kt denotes “pure gold,” simply refers to the percentage of gold in a given piece. In essence, the gold karat is a standard of measurement used to determine price. But instead of being understood as a ratio of gold to alloy, we have been conditioned to equate karats with value.

Prima Materia creates jewelry from hand-crafted alloys that intentionally use smaller percentages of gold in historically inflected ways of making. These unconventional alloys provide the key that unlocks historical techniques like shakudo (a Japanese patination technique that creates lustrous purple-black gold surfaces), and depletion gilding (an ancient process practiced by Mesoamericans and the Romans, among others, that uses acid mixtures to corrode off the alloy and thus enrich the surface). Goldsmiths across time and cultures have understood the inherent beauty of gold to be revealed by blending it with different metals. It is the alloy, the admixture of gold with other metals, that catalyzes the aesthetic experience of gold jewelry. 

Prima Materia jewelry believes the true value of gold lies within its mindful process of making and ways that materials acquire meaning through the act of creation and adornment – and to have that story hold its value rather than the karat. 

With this credo, Prima Materia elevates goldwork to new levels of artistry and disrupts conventional notions of value as purity. This follows Prima Materia’s position on sustainability: To produce less, more critically.

Prima Materia jewelry shapes the future by innovating foundational techniques of the past. It combines metalworking knowledge from different cultures with a powerful design thesis to create jewelry that uses historical practices in response to our present lived experience. True value expresses itself in good design. Good design is bound to its heritage of artisanal frameworks and cultural connections. To conceive of the future of jewelry is to honor its rich past, making its present meaningful by adding materials from different places, processes from different cultures. 

This is the future of gold: Bringing people into a conversation about materials that they never knew, illuminating a deeper history that they never knew and can now see shaped into individual form. 

This artist’s statement lives in each piece of jewelry that flows out from my bench and into the world.