MINERALARTS: Iron and Thorn

Last weekend we hiked in the hills south of our house, where grass, cactus, and thorny shrubs give way to agaves and desert oaks.  A hundred years ago, there were several active copper mines in the area, and while hiking we see glory holes, ore piles, old dirt roads, and a shiny black heap of slag that looks like a small mountain of obsidian.  I can imagine what it must have looked like at night, through the dusky coal smoke of the smelter - the molten metal glowing white, then darkening to red as the copper bars cooled; the fiery orange slag splashing onto the pile, reeking of sulfur - until one night around 1910, when the inevitable happened and a forest fire destroyed the smelter, and gave the land back to the yuccas and oaks.  But we have the collector’s instinct that drew the first miners here, and we pick through the slag and bring home a treasure trove of tiny glass drips that look like bones, twigs, or strange machine parts.  Some may find their way into jewelry, but I’ll just put most of them in a small copper bowl.

I don’t have a lot to say about this amulet.  Four inches long, four hot-forged pods - two copper, one steel, and one sterling silver.  It started out as something entirely different.  When the original idea didn’t work out, I nearly abandoned the pieces until I discovered how neatly the iron and silver pods fit together.  I knew that I needed to finish it that way, so I made the copper pods to go with it.  It seems appropriate for the dark moon.

The top stone on this pendant is a tiny slice of the Esquel pallasite that I bought several years ago.  The other stone is native terrestrial iron from Siberia, which I bought as a small slab and cut to match the pallasite.  Together they are an image of the boundary deep in the earth where the iron-magnesium silicates of the lower mantle give way to the pure nickel-iron of the core.  The iron hook is strung on a leather cord at the moment, but I plan to make a silver and iron chain for it.

Pallasites are rare meteorites that contain glassy transparent pale green or greenish-brown olivine crystals in an iron matrix.  They are some of the most spectacular of all rocks, and probably represent fragments of the interior of an ancient shattered proto-planet.  Each pallasite is unique in appearance.  Some have many olivine crystals, others have very few.  Some have large olivine crystals (the Esquel is especially notable for these) and others have tiny dustlike particles.  The iron matrix may be smooth and shining (as in Esquel) or it may reveal complex interlocking crystal patterns when etched (these are called Widmanstatten patterns, and were first described from meteorites but are also seen in certain steels, such as railroad rail welds).  The drawing below shows a tiny piece of the Imilac pallasite.  This meteorite was found as a few large pieces and many small fragments, most of  them with only the iron “skeleton” holding the remains of highly weathered olivine crystals. 

The other stone in the pendant is native iron from Siberia.  Pure iron metal is very rare in the earth’s rocks, since iron is unstable when oxygen is present, and usually combines with oxygen, silica, sulfur, and other elements to form many common minerals .  Metallic terrestrial iron is known from only a few localities.  The Siberian iron occurs as irregular blebs in a rock that is made mostly of altered olivine.

I’m working on several paintings for a poster presentation that I’ll be taking to a botany conference in two weeks.  The poster is mostly about using handground mineral pigments in egg tempera for botanical illustration, but will also include scratchboard art and a couple of craft projects like this:

Jaguar Tracks in Blue Oak Canyon  10″x14″

Amate (Mexican bark paper, which represents rocks), muscovite and biotite mica flakes and powdered pearlescent mica pigment (flowing water), copper foil (blue oak leaves), gold metallic powders (acorns), silver scratchboard (forefoot track), red ochre (hind foot track), malachite and azurite pigments (the moon, and the copper ores which are found in the canyon).

TURQUOISE has been turning up more frequently in my art recently, and it looks like that will continue for awhile.  I have an ambivalent relationship with this stone.  I’m not fond of most turquoise jewelry or its various cultural trappings - my attraction to it is much more primitive.  My favorite cuts are the round “donut” discs with a hole in the center, large smooth but irregularly-shaped beads, and some very simple cabochons.  When I use it in jewelry, I’m trying for a look that is primitive but universal - something to display on a blanket on the ground, that could have come out of a trader’s pack yesterday or three thousand years ago.  I just finished this necklace of hammered and hot-forged copper, African cast-glass beads, a Chinese turquoise donut, and an antique Chinese cast-bronze bell (this is OLD, and the subtle design on the surface was worn and obscured long before the beautiful patina developed).  The bell has a lighter, more tinkly sound than my iron bells.

A few days ago, turquoise entered my creative life in a different way when I accepted a commission for a lion doll made with the same pattern as the one on my website.  But this one is to be a Tibetan snow lion, white with a turquoise mane.  I am already having fun planning his blanket and ornaments, even though I won’t be able to start on the project until after the botany conference.

Yesterday we went cranewatching and fernhunting, two activities that have special significance in southeastern Arizona.  Thousands of sandhill cranes spend part of the winter here, drawn to the warm weather, cornfields, and small artificial ponds.  A thousand years ago, they would have come for the natural cienegas (marshes) and grasslands that have now vanished.  Their wild, primitive cries and whistling feathers swirl over us now - voice of the High Plains wind, ice on the Platte River, and that older Ice that never reached the desert, but still colors the feathers of the wildest of birds.

We watched several barn owls fluttering in a willow thicket - pale soft wings flickering among tangled twigs - and found a sleeping long-eared owl nearly invisible beside a willow trunk.  A small flock of snow geese gathered on the pond and a ferruginous hawk - another Plains visitor - hunted in a field.  Then it was time to follow the gravel road over the hills and admire the view of distant mountain ranges while we hunted for two rare ferns among the limestone outcrops.  They are Mexican plants that enter the U.S. only in extreme southeastern Arizona and the Big Bend region of Texas.  I found them and a couple of other ferns, and added all four to my online fern guide.

http://www.mineralarts.com/ferns/DesertFernsGuide.html 

A couple of days ago I made these simple earrings as a demonstration for a friend, showing two different sizes of copper wire:  14 gauge spirals and 16 gauge loops for the African cast glass beads.

To celebrate my birthday (yesterday) and the cold rainy weather (the first significant winter rain since early 2005), I finished this necklace, which is inspired by the Tarot High Priestess.  The pendant is fossil mammoth ivory that I cut and polished to highlight a rare and beautiful blue vivianite “eye” pattern.  The back is hot-forged sterling silver set with an eye agate.  The beads are blue lace agate, cut in the style of ancient stone beads - no two are the same size or thickness, and they have a smooth frosted finish, not a high polish.  This was a prototype strand that I bought at the gem show a few years ago from the same Chinese gem cutter who made my frosted aquamarine beads.  Unfortunately, she did not make any more frosted beads because most buyers prefer the high polish.  The necklace is strung as a choker to fit me, but I have enough beads to add nearly four inches if the buyer wants it restrung longer….and I kept back a couple of odd larger beads for a pair of earrings.

I re-strung a strand of frosted aquamarine beads and added a pendant that I made a couple of years ago:  it’s rare Blue Ice chalcedony from Greenland.  I bought the cabochon because it looks exactly like a Greenland glacier.  The forged silver hook is inspired by Viking silver designs.  A wintry necklace with the quiet clarity of ancient ice, to wear with iron earrings.

I also took apart a multi-stone necklace from Pakistan, salvaging only the strand of Afghani lapis beads and the silver clasp.  I added antique African carnelian beads, a green Chinese turquoise donut, and copper spirals.  Three stones that have been precious for thousands of years, in a design that could have come from almost anywhere in the ancient world.  More colorful than anything I usually wear, but it matches my fancy embroidered Indian dress.

Here’s a tiny version of the Fish Pod Knife that is on my Knives webpage.  The design is taken from a beautifully forged 19th century antique Chinese fisherman’s knife that I bought a few years ago.  This one is only 2 1/4 inches long and is forged from a 4″ cut nail that was divided into three pieces to make the pod, blade, and rivet.  It was just an experimental piece and doesn’t have a fancy finish - it will probably adorn a fabric bag or a bell chain.  Now I want to try making the pod out of silver or copper.

Here’s another set of bells that are designed to be hung on a drum or bag, though they can also be worn as a rather rustic necklace.  I made a similar set awhile ago with different style cones and a copper clapper.  These are all salvaged materials - scrap iron, evaporative cooler tubing, and electrical wire.  But the sound is sweet and tinkly.

This is a custom medicine bag made from pomegranate-dyed hemp/cotton, lined with natural undyed hemp silk.  It’s larger than the typical neck pouch, so it can hold more items.  Padded with cotton batting (lining is quilted), with woven hemp drawstrings, recycled silk tassels, copper spirals, Chinese turquoise disc, Tibetan turquoise bead.  Pretty enough to display, but just the right size to carry hidden in a purse or large pocket.  Contents are secret, of course.

While walking on the beach at Cape Hatteras Point - our pilgrimage to the “utter East” or the “end of the world” - I found two large whelk shells.  Three species of whelks are commonly found as broken beach shells on the Outer Banks.  The Point is one of the best places to find whole shells.  Shown on the left is the Lightning Whelk (Busycon contrarium) which is unusual in having a sinistral spiral - a left-handed opening.  Most snails are “right handed”.  This particular shell retains some of its natural colors.  On the right is its heavier cousin, the Knobbed Whelk (Busycon carica).  This shell is more wave-battered and is stained brown with iron oxide and gray with iron sulfide.

As soon as I picked it up and shook the sand out in the surf, I saw that the larger shell would make a good trumpet, as is done with conch shells.  I didn’t want to saw off the beautiful terminal spiral, but one of the knobs on the shell had several small wormholes in it, so I drilled that out and flared a piece of copper tubing for the mouthpiece.  The fringe is white silk, and the bead is a rusty iron beach pebble.