The Year Of The Comet (When We Spent Time Indoors)
The Year of the Comet (When We Spent Time Indoors) was my micro-collection (Hope, which came late in the year of 2020 is really a Year Of The Comet Part II) where I hoped to commemorate something of the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. Here is what I initially wrote about it:
Is it perverse to want to create a souvenir of these days? It is. But it isn't my fault.
There is something about the image of 4.5 billion people asked to stay indoors - the vista of all those casements, looking out on different landscapes and townscapes - all those individual subjective experiences on the inside, looking out. And if those windows weren't enough - what about the ultimate of symbols, that omen of omens - when this Spring not one but TWO comets flew into our purview.
Of course I am doing this super aesthetically - after all, it is jewelry. I picked places to symbolize the spots hit the hardest, spots we love to visit and now cannot - New Yorkish and Italy-ish portals. Through these windows, we will see the same comet will flare, in 24ct gold - symbolizing the same sky and predicament we are all under.
The Year Of The Comet: Italy ; cloisonnรฉ enamel, hand-fabrition venetian trade beads pectoral necklace
(private collection)
What I first wrote about the piece in Spring 2020:
Sometimes from intense opposition, the very thing we are opposing founds fertile ground and blooms. It's all that thinking about it that waters if without our wanting or intention. In my case, my determination to push the woe of the world outta my work resulted in the exact opposite - I had to make work ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐ผ๐๐ it.
Since all this began, I thought of Italy a lot. Even not considering the proximity of my homeland to the country, you could simply say all humans are siblings especially in our anxieties and hopes (and who was not moved by those early videos, when people only half-believed it would reach their own doors, of Italians singing in their balconies?) I looked a lot at live feed cameras from spots in Italy I had visited - an eerily empty Piazza Della Signoria in Florence, so strikingly like a De Chirico painting.
For the ๐ ๐ฆ๐ข๐ณ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ต, (๐๐ฉ๐ฆ๐ฏ ๐๐ฆ ๐๐ฑ๐ฆ๐ฏ๐ต ๐๐ช๐ฎ๐ฆ ๐๐ฏ๐ฅ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ณ๐ด) mini collection I knew that one of the 'windows' behind which we have all been symbolically sequestered had to be over a scene inspired by sweet Italy. No people in the scene, but with the signs of people. And a lonely little cat staring out at the sky, at that one comet, comet Atlas, augury of our times - before it dissolved into pieces in late April.
This necklace is meant as commemorative wearable art. Souvenir of our time.
The Year Of the Comet: New York City; cloisonne enamel, hand-fabrication, vintage brass beads
(private collection)
This piece symbolised New York under stay-at-home order during the first wave of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Hope
Cloisonnรฉ enamel, opals - private collections
Hope was my follow-up to The Year Of The Comet, and was the result of entering a lustre-less Winter season almost a whole year into the covid-19 pandemic. Symbols of hope and glimmer of light were needed and timely - vaccines, dovers, hearts, stars over mountains were the visual for this collection. The Eye of Love and the Star Of Hope would enter the BMMBX imagery and find their ways to later collections.