philosophy

Prima Materia’s aesthetic describes the art of transformation. 

The jewelry I create reflects my views about material, environmental, and personal transformations: I am profoundly inspired by the cracked paved pathways I encounter in Ft. Tryon, the park I walk through almost every day in New York City where I live.

These cracks are beautiful! Nothing about them is random at all. Causal factors made their patterns. Tree roots pushing up. Weather pressing down. Feet, paws, park maintenance vehicles continuously pounding the ground. This busted pavement constitutes the perfect symbol of the industrial forces of humanity in dialogue with the irrepressible forces of nature. Asphalt becomes emblematic of our built environment and the materials we extract, refine, use, and discard in creating-maintaining systems that shape our way of human being in the world. 

I see a universal language encoded in these pavement cracks. I abstract jewelry forms from them.

These earrings are formed from blue topaz and depletion gilded gold.

The gems were once near-colorless and irradiated to enhance their color, as is most blue topaz on the global gem market. The body of the piece is made from hand-crafted 7kt gold, depletion gilded using a recipe based on a 17th-century alchemical text.

Which brings me to modern alchemy.

I poured the molten metal into a mold. The metal bar that emerged was worked into elongated rectangular shapes, the ripple effects that forging and sawing produced remain on its body as my maker’s mark. This is the metal revealing its beauty through the human hand that brings forth its shape. 

The gemstones arrived in larger chunks. I sliced them down, retaining their smooth sides and rough natural edge because there was something about the raw nature of the stones that brought them into dialogue with the gold pieces. I added delicate, matte facets along their base; this created opalescence, an ethereal inner golden glow, through the interplay of light reflecting off the 18kt green gold layer that I soldered to the silver backplate that affixes the stones to the earlobe.

The coloration of both the gems and metal that comprise this piece of jewelry have been altered in appearance through human manipulation of matter. While Prima Materia jewelry also features “natural” stones (gems that have not been color-enhanced) that have been responsibly mined, my choice in using blue topaz for this particular piece is to responsibly use color-enhanced stones. It is dangerous to fetishize “perfection,” and it is not sustainable. There are already hundreds of millions of carats worth of color-enhanced gems in circulation, more are produced annually. This manipulated material also has a history. Prima Materia jewelry provides it with a future by placing it in conversation with the new stones being mined and entering the market through an ethical jewelry movement taking shape around us.

The material manipulation that characterizes the gold and gems in these earrings brings out a whole new kind of inner beauty. I work with 7kt gold because chemically it opens up new aesthetic properties while using a smaller percentage of gold material. I do not view this process as trying to make the metal resemble 24 kt gold. With depletion gilding, I subscribe to what certain Mesoamerican societies believed about the process, that it brought out the inner essence of the metal through ritualized ways of metalworking. This ancient understanding of gold, alloys, chemistry, and spirit is so beautiful to me.

Prima Materia jewelry participates in this continuum of meaning-making through practice. Rituals of making resonate with ways of working with nature and of understanding chemistry to bring out the inner beauty of the piece. The gems and metal that make up these earrings brings this concept to life.

And that is where my mission, ethical jewelry that brings hidden histories to light, comes into play.