In Western New Mexico, the area of land known as El Malpais has a reputation as a desolate and impenetrably hard region of volcanic rock covered sandstone. The black surface has given rise to generations of legends and mythologies. The El Malpais Bracelet appropriates the aesthetic tension between smooth surfaces and fractured lines. Deploying flat plane photographs of El Malpais and wrapping them around each sphere creates 3-Dimensional maps of an instance. Each sphere becomes a tactile photograph and creates a sequential journey through a landscape.

This representation of El Malpais is created using 3-D modeling software to map the photographs onro spheroid surfaces and to generate depth to the fracture lines and surface imperfections of the landscape. The digital models are then 3-D printed using a laser sintering process to produce the fracture lines in the white nylon spheres. The result is a wearable photo-map of the landscape it expresses.

Photographs by Melissa Cicetti.

The high desert connects with its inhabitants in unique ways. The haunting feeling of this landscape comes from its ability to preserve a sense of vast time and memory in the silence and distance of its open spaces and in the water carved sandstone canyons. In the area of the Chaco Canyon a civilization etched into the landscape a memory of their culture, preserved by the climate, and still speaking to us in a language of form that is abstract but also visceral. Between AD 850 and AD 1150 the ancestral Puebloan people designed and built Pueblo Bonito – center of the Chacoan world. The site has been studied for over one hundred and fifty years and it still keeps many secrets. Current thinking suggests that Pueblo Bonito was a ritual center. Pueblo Bonito is divided into two by a precisely aligned wall, running north to south, through the central plaza. This pendant is folded along that wall.

The pendant was cast using a lost wax method wherein the wax mold was 3-D printed in Denmark and then cast in silver. This pendant combines the ancient form of the site with contemporary technology. Removing the pueblo from its context changes its significance. The language of the form speaks to everyone differently. To some the pendant resembles a meteorite. Others recognize Pueblo Bonito and it surfaces their own connections to place. We are straining to decipher what is an echo of another time and place, another world.

This necklace is a wearable concept derived from the VACA wall mural I did last year. You can see the mural pictured below. The design began with the purchase of a cow skull from the Ecuadorian owners of a small open-air shop near the Santa Fe Plaza. They informed me that friends of theirs collect the skulls for them along the U.S./Mexico border. The mural is a study of a steer skull with circles of varying diameters. For the necklace the circles were repositioned to achieve a nice drape when worn. It was then laser cut from top grain black dye leather and distressed by hand washing which also helps to rid it of the burnt flesh smell.

Oryx were introduced into Southern New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range (Trinity site) in 1969 as exotic big game.  Coyotes and mountain lions posed no threat and the Oryx thrived, tipping the balance of the White Sands National Monument’s ecosystem.  The stylized image of stark black horns against white gypsum sands is one only conjured up in dreams.  I recently received an Oryx skull with horns from a friend (thanks, Matt) whose father found while walking near White Sands.  A dream becomes reality.

The second component of the design derives from my birthplace, the Caribbean. The bracelets pictured are strands of black coral picked up from local fishermen in the Island of Margarita, Venezuela. Black corals are a deep water tree-like coral. Their living tissue is brightly colored but the name derives from the black color of their skeleton.  They are very slow growing and some date back 2000 years – growing an average of .0005″ a year.

The process of making this piece includes 3d scanning the bracelets so they can be manipulated in the modeling program Rhino. The goal is to translate these two natural ornaments into a man-made wearable narrative. There is a kind of symmetry between the two objects. The Oryx horn is not bone, though we often think of it as such. The black coral is much closer to a form of bone, built of calcium carbonate, though it is never referred to in this way. At the same time, they could not be more different. One thrives in the deserts of New Mexico as a transplant and the other a fragile, deep water organism.