Forging a Practice

As an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, I wandered into a lecture by John Prip, the renowned Danish silversmith who headed RISD’s Jewelry and Metalsmithing Department. I saw forms that were entirely new to me. From modernist hollowware to sculptural jewelry, his work was grounded in Danish tradition but pushed toward a cleaner, more experimental American modernism that combined precision, elegance, wit and restraint. I was transfixed.

I had entered RISD to become a painter, but by the middle of my first year that path no longer felt right. What drew me instead was the chance to solve problems, but not entirely my own — to work more directly with my hands, to build things and to make something useful. The Metalsmithing Department, housed in an old textile factory of stone, brick and heavy timber, a place where useful things had been made for over a century, it felt like a world unto itself. The forming room, the exhaust hoods and annealing torches, the culture of making, I was completely seduced. Still, I didn’t make jewelry then; I was a metalsmith, making large sculptural work.

After graduation, I rented a studio in a small South End factory that had once been part of Boston’s Leather District. There, I continued the work started at RISD and gradually turned toward jewelry.

My design language emerged from metalsmithing: the hammer, the flame and the slow, intuitive process of forming metal by hand in solitude. But I was also looking outward. To clear my head, I wandered through the department stores and boutiques of affluent Back Bay, where fashion offered something my metals did not: layers, pattern, contrast and attitude. I began laminating sterling silver with brass, copper and nickel silver to create painterly effects. I soldered contrasting linings to pieces, borrowing from the logic of garment construction. Stripes and polka dots came from drilling and soldering and other patterns came from filing and etching.

The 1980s were an explosive period in fashion. Pop, rock, new wave, MTV, sports, Wall Street, power dressing and shifting ideas of gender all changed how people considered adornment. Costume jewelry wasn’t pretending to be fine jewelry, it was bold, communicative and unapologetic. Jewelry could project identity and power before a word was spoken. All of this created an unprecedented demand.

I knew I had to expand my designs and my market. I began creating seasonal collections for New York trade shows: Spring/Summer, Fall/Winter and Holiday. The major retailers were there, American and International, along with the press. The weeks leading up to the shows were intense and competitive. I worked obsessively, hired friends to help design display booths and photograph each collection, pushing every season to go further than the one before.

Fashion magazines provided another education. I studied the work of Avedon, Penn, Elgort, Demarchelier, Turbeville and others, absorbing their rigorous visual standards that shaped high fashion culture at the time.

Before long, my jewelry began appearing in the pages of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Elle magazines.

Soon, my work was carried by major retailers including Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Henri Bendel, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys New York, among others.

This archive traces the beginnings of a visual language — rooted in metalsmithing, shaped by fashion and carried forward throughout my career.