Would you like a peek behind the curtain at our design process?
Our signature collection process is collaborative and oftentimes we incubate ideas for a long time - letting them develop in drawings and extensive conversations.
For every piece of jewelry that becomes a reality there are at least 100 more ideas that never made it off the page.
The spark of life comes when the perfect alchemy between theme, aesthetics, and materials arises.
We know a piece will be a success when we both get excited about its creation.
Dave spends time sketching almost every day. I explore the sketches to see what catches my eye and make suggestions on developing certain ideas. Typically I know which materials I want to use next, so we work together on adapting his ideas to incorporate these.
The magical piece of the process is the “why” - the theme that gives us a reason to actually take a design off the page.
Variations on iconography in Dave's notebook
The Vis Vitae Collection was a design that went from page to prototype as Dave worked out the technical challenges, but it didn’t coalesce into an actual collection of jewelry until we found the animating force behind the pieces.
Vis Vitae literally means “vital life force” in Latin.
This collection is named for the Feminine Archetype in all her many forms - maiden, mother, seer, creatrix, crone. We celebrate the diverse expressions of this infinite source of love and compassion in this collection.
Dave tinkered for several years on developing a convertible pendant design. Its general form, with its ancient Goddess totem shape, inspired me to think of the divine feminine.
This led to a deep dive into how we, as a family, honor this energy in our own lives; and what voice we, as a jewelry atelier, had to add to the millennia of art inspired by this subject matter.
Design sketch illustrating clasp mechanism
Taking inspiration from the goddesses of the Norse pantheon we selected a theme for each piece to represent a range of archetypal energies. We selected materials that energetically matched each theme. Then we turned to symbols and icons to point to each archetype and worked these into the settings.
We love the convertible nature of the pendants for representing the vital life force in two expressions - the seed form and the fully manifest form. Each is beautiful and complete, and when you wear a Vis Vitae piece you can choose which one to express as the mood strikes.
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