Beth Hammett Art

And that reason is you.

Art jewelry tends to be about ideas or trying out a new way of making sculpture small enough to wear.  Commerical jewelry tends to be about the piece containing  precious metals and fine quality stones.  I went to a workshop this weelend with Ken Bova.  His own work is intensively personal and has a mixed media ethic about it, even though many of these pieces are composed of high carat gold or silver.  We all got to laughing about how the diamond became the symbol of fine engagement rings  back in the first half of the 2oth Century, in an era of the typical ring having a large colored stone such as a blue saphire or many red garnets.  As the story goes, in the early days of fims, the diamond cartel paid for the movie industry to show the stars wearing diamond rings.  And so a style was born.  Now, people have begun to wear so called chocolate diamonds, and art jewelery such as Todd Reed even use black diamonds in their jewelry pieces.

So it is up to you to look around among us art jewelers and find tiny sculpture to wear on yorself that has special meaning, either just to you, as a sort of secret coded so that others don’t  understand why you are wearing it, or some easily recognized object like a heart.  Thomas Mann has an entire collection which he calls “Techno-Romantic” in which he used hearts with rivets and overlays, which actually look just like a diagram of the human heart.

Please go and look at Ken Bova’s website, and know that he is now teaching here in North Carolina at East Carolina University.  Their Fine Arts Metals Program is filled with talented and well known faculty.  Go take a look.