Samm Cohen

Jewelry with Purpose

Posted on August 13, 2013     2 Comments

ed to sit in my high school classes intense and absorbed, as I doodled small pictures of inspired jewelry made of wire and stones that I would work on when I went home.  On weekends I would go to Star Magic in Manhattan and buy varieties of quartz for jeweled consumption.  Not that I was a bad student, I did well in school and was interested, but not with the passion that I had for making things.  Especially small things I could wear around my neck or wrist or finger.  I grew older and took classes in things like metal smithing and worked in NY’s Diamond District bezel making, learning many things and seeing elegant things.  But it wasn’t until I interned at a ceramics place that I really requestioned why jewelry has to be made out of those  traditional metals and seemly arbitrarily expensive stones cut in typical shapes.  And while that experience was important to my growth as a foundation, I felt free to springboard into refreshed materials.  After all, there are beautiful qualities in many things that maybe I did look at too hard before, that if brought out right, I could see.  Stuff that I might discard, that would be considered junk.  So I’m not going to give you an long brooding altruistic speech about how the garbage we produce is at a rate of over a billion pound a day in America or how we were taught that and teach that not to fix or value things as we push to have the newest whatever, which is ofcourse true and important, but Id rather focus on all the beauty that is everywhere waiting to be exhumed.  This to me add extra meaning to repurposing things that seemed to fade into the background before.

Heres some one of a kind things to hand from your ear made partially out of everyday items