Working with METAL

This series began with a simple piece that I created for my mother several years ago. At the time most of my creative energy was being spent painting, and I was doing just doing enough metalwork to keep my skills intact. Each year I would make a piece for my mom at the holidays and for her birthday. As I began to work with these medallions it became immediately apparent that there was an infinite potential for variations within the confines of the motif. I then set about developing a vocabulary within these variations. This collection of pieces is the result.

The pieces have a distinctly ornate feel that reminded me of Byzantine art. I am Armenian on my mother’s side and Italian on my father’s, and these medallions just seemed to resonate with my ethnic heritage. About a year and a half after I had begun producing these pieces a friend of mine came back from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had been stunned when she came upon an early Roman necklace that looked almost identical to this work. When we showed the pictures to my husband he then remarked,” I think you just sprang another DNA leak!” I have since been to the Villa Giulia in Rome and have seen shields from the 3rd century B.C. that feature uncannily similar motifs and designs. So again I find myself creating work that seems to come from a deep well. I love making these pieces. Each one is unique, and I feel that though they are made with simple materials, they have an exquisite quality about them; a visual richness. They do exactly what a piece of jewelry should do….they sparkle and adorn.