Studio Notes on Life Love Labor Land Reliquary Ring

Every year I make a new ring for myself. Instead of the traditional wedding band where the ring symbolizes something eternal with your partner, I decided to create a collection of rings, one every year, that would represent our growth.

These rings range in themes, techniques, intentions, stories. Some are about us, some are to experiment with a creative thought, others are about family. This year, I really wanted to honor the process of mourning which is the stage that comes after grieving. Mourning is more personal, it's about your inner ways of dealing with the grief, and my interpretation of grief is best expressed through jewelry.

For this ring, I wanted to create a piece that would connect my father and me in one design. As I started sketching, I drew quadrants. I knew I wanted to create four compartments that could hold and represent aspects of our lives together, intertwined into a single piece.

I wrote, "I am you, and you are me," and from there I envisioned a ring that held parts of each of us while keeping the lines between who was who slightly blurry. This would keep our spirits together, our pasts woven into one piece that I could carry with me, and it became a way of bringing him into the future. Conceptually, it became a way of keeping him alive, eternal life represented by our togetherness.

The idea of four compartments lingered in my head for some days. What would they represent? What was important to both us? Slowly, the words came to me and I came up with four words for each compartment.

Life

Love

Labor

Land

Here is a video to show the process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISR2KQiBrLw

For Love, I chose representations of my mother and my husband. Fabric as my mom is a quilter, and saffron from Spain where my husband is from.

For Labor, I collected earth from an adobe block and silver filings from my studio. My father was a builder who was taken by the New Mexican landscapes and with adobe homes. I have always loved jewelry, both wearing it and making it. I always felt fortunate to be able to watch my father be very passionate about what he did.

For Land, I collected wild sage from our backyard and added a snippet of a pine leaf I had saved from my travels to Spain. New Mexico and Spain are places we both felt a deep connection to, traveled to often, and are places I have lived.

For Life, I took cuttings of both mine and my daughter's hair. I was drawn to an idea I had read somewhere about how hair can hold memory. There is some science behind this idea, mostly that your hair acts as a record of your life as it holds the emotional imprints that you experience. Joy or stress, these hormonal shifts can affect your hair and can supposedly leave traces of it in your hair growth. Whether that's true or not, I love the idea of it. I imagined both mine and my daughter's hair being imprinted with the joy my father brought into our lives, the memories it could hold of him, and how we are the continuation of him.

For now, I've only completed the top part of this ring. I have yet to work on the ring band, but the idea hasn't quite come to me yet. With this shift in my jewelry practice, I am allowing the inspiration to strike when it's ready. It's out there, I just don't know yet how this ring will become a reality.

Thanks so much for reading.

Take care for now,

Caitlin