Shimmering in the Darkness

Sometimes it doesn’t take a lot to express emotion, energy, and atmosphere in such a way as to elicit a response. This necklace was just such a piece for me. It grabbed me as it came across my screen while I was rapidly scrolling through Pinterest and I slammed on the virtual brakes.

It may not speak to you quite so insistently but, then, I do have a penchant for things that are torn and worn down because of the sense of story I see behind them. It’s a twinge of curiosity, the same kind you would have if you saw an old torn dress – you would wonder what happened to it and the person that wore it. You just know there’s a story behind the state it is in. Story is fascinating and important to me, so visual echoes of a story will jump out to me. I imagine it does for this artist as well.

The artist here is Allison L Norfleet Bruenger, a metal jewelry artist who works in very organic shapes and applications. Much of her work is far more involved than this piece, with added color and layers but this necklace, with its dramatic torn edges and missing spaces, doesn’t need a lot of embellishment. It comes across as the remnant of some once functional object now elevated to a focused beauty. The sparkling teardrop, roughly wrapped with copper wire at its point relays a desperate but subtle insistence to raise what it is attached to up from a wrecked piece of metal to something precious in the eye of the viewer. And it does do that for me, and apparently many other people since it was shared around Pinterest quite a bit.

If this kind of work speaks to you, then you may want to take a moment to wander through Allison’s website here or follow her on Instagram.