This piece began a while back, inspired by the work of my favorite jewelry artist, Anthony Lent. His Adorned Hands collection has always stayed with me. Some of his most powerful work, in my eyes (sorry, you know I can’t help myself 😎). I made two early versions and knew the idea needed more time, so I let it rest. A recent conversation with him on the @athousandfacets podcast is where the design resurfaced and ready to be revisited.
What resonated most in that conversation was the idea of making for yourself first, and allowing the work to find its own path within your practice or business, if and when the time comes. Not everything you make needs to neatly fit your main customer and maybe it shouldn’t. As artists, we need to create first, and let the meaning, purpose, and audience reveal themselves later.
It made me think about how easily the pure act of making.. making simply to make can slip away once an audience enters the room. This version of the design came from a place of returning to that instinct.
At first glance, you might see an eye held by hands.
But what if it’s something else entirely?
What do you see?
Is it protection? Creation? Witnessing? Or a form that shifts the longer you sit with it?
While designing this piece, I kept returning to the idea of perception.. how the same image can hold multiple truths depending on how, and when, you look at it.
One reference is Figure–Ground Reversal, famously explored by M. C. Escher, where positive and negative space trade roles. In works like Sky and Water I, birds become fish, background becomes subject, and the eye is asked to choose… then choose again. There is no single correct reading,, only a continuous oscillation.
Another influence (of course) comes from Salvador Dalí ~duh! You all know how I love his use of ambiguous imagery: forms that seamlessly transform into something else entirely. In paintings like Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, a face dissolves into a still life, and perception itself becomes the artwork. Meaning emerges not from certainty, but from instability.
This piece lives in that in-between space.
It asks nothing of you except to look
and then look again… and maybe once more.
Sometimes it’s just an eye and hands.
Sometimes it’s something else altogether.
And sometimes, it’s simply art made for the sake of being made.
👁️🖤
I personally believe this pendant will only become more interesting with time. As the silver naturally oxidizes and darkens in the crevices, the details will become more defined, giving the piece even more depth and dimension. I love the idea that it will continue to change and evolve as it’s worn.
This pendant does not come with a chain. For chains click here!
