Why create jewelry of metal and stone?

Why express yourself through metal and stone? Why not just tell someone or write them a letter? Give them a phone call or send an email or maybe a hug? Well, we forget what people good us, letters are treasured, then socked away in a drawer or a folder, or simply get lost and recycled (fingers crossed), phone calls end, emails are archived, and hugs, as sweet as they are, ate forgotten.
Metal and stone endure. Some noble metals will endure without ever changing or tarnishing. Stones hold their color and don't fade. The meaning and memories we place inside them will last forever. They imbibe the spirit and energy of our hearts. They do not echo a message, they are the message! They can be kept close when worn as jewelry, the meaning revealed and renewed each time they are slipped on. Others see, talk about them. The conversations and touches glances reminding and buttressing the story embodied within and without the metal and stone. A picture can say a thousand words. A piece of metal and stone jewelry can tell a thousand words to a thousand generations.

Create with Love,

Justinder

Competition

What if instead of competing, businesses cooperated? What if instead of trying so hard to get, we tried equally as hard to give?

I feel the object of the studio is not to maximize sales or profits or market share. I feel the object of life is to make life better for ourselves by making life beter for those around us. We are all linked. Our fates are one. To take from another is to take from ourselves. To give to another is to give to ourselves.

Casual Disregard (2/28/11)

Today while sitting at a railroad crossing with my engine off waiting for a freight train to thunder by, I saw a man do something far from unusual. He was smoking a cigarette, and without a thought as the last carriage went by, dropped it still lit and smoking to the ground. As the cigarette smoldered, so too did my heart. I wanted to drag that man out of his lifted truck and beg of him why. Why do you not care about the world and those around you. What could possibly compel you to casually disregard the possibility for something as awful as starting a fire in the oil soaked garbage that litters the side of the tracks in still dry brush?
Sadly this attitude is prevalent in the jewelry industry on a scale that is abominable. What do Jewelers do with used up toxic plating solutions laced with cyanide and arsenic? Why pour them down the drain of course. What to do about those toxic fumes and silicon particles from casting that are so dangerous, volatile and toxic full face chemical and particulate masks are required in any other monitored industry? Why they pump it outside of course into the surrounding neighborhoods. What to do with the massive open pits from precious metal mines coated in sulfur and toxins that can leach into the groundwater? Leave them right where they are and let the next generation deal with it.
This is not simply a matter of blame, it is a matter of understanding. I am not free from blame for these practices as I too blindly sold and created without a thought as to how it was being done. It is not that people or the industry are going out of their way to harm the environment. I don't believe that man who dropped the cigarette had any ill will towards those around him, nor do any Jewelers who release toxic, mutagenic and heavy metal compounds into the environment (usually in heavily concentrated population areas such as downtown la or even your neighborhood jeweler). It is just the easiest thing for them to do and most often they are not even aware of the damage and potential for greater damage they are doing. Education is needed to show the consequences of these toxic actions and choices.
A part of why the studio was created and continued is to overcome this blindness and near sightedness. As my eyes have been opened, I want to open the eyes of both the public and other Jewelers in the industry of the harm caused every day by casual negligence. Not knowing is no longer an excuse. As an industry we must take responsibility for our actions, we must realize that their is a greater cost than what is on our books for the profits we receive. We must take responsibility for and examine every choice and every action for its consequence.

Counting Profits (how I began looking at jewelry differently 2/13/11)

I've been told by family, friends and colleagues that I am a bit overzealous about my strides to become toxin free, to have a business based on love not profits and my belief that the reaches of how conscious I should be has no limits. I agree. My thirst for knowledge about the toxic metals, poisons, acids, the chemically caustic and mutagenic compounds the jewelry industry uses every day is insatiable. The changes I'm making in the studio are not easy to get used to, are usually big steps, take lots of time to research, and are generally quite expensive in relation to what has been tried and true. Some of the things I change are so small and minute, it is hard to justify the time and expense that went into them. However, if I don't learn, no one will ever tell me. If I don't take the steps to protect my Jewelers who work with these materials every day and my customers who will wear the pieces we create possibly every day of their lives, who will?
When I ran the store with my dad I never knew that what was used to create the jewelry I sold was toxic. The business was just that, a business. Buy some stuff, sell it for more than you bought and there in the profit is a business. Simple, I should be able to follow that, make a living, buy some nice stuff throughout my life grow old, retire, and pass on the wealth to my family when I die. I didn't think beyond that, as I wasn't enjoying this life of a businessman. It wasn't until Love started to open my mind and heart to the universe that I started to take a deeper look at what was the result of what I did every day to make a living. What I discovered was I was a purveyor of jewelry so toxic that it would have been illegal to sell in Europe.
It started out when I tried to find out why a particular customers prong broke for no apparent reason I could discern and decided to research it that I discovered nickel was the primary alloy. At first, I was only interested in how the nickel was corroding to the point the prongs were breaking and the stones were coming out, a type of jewelry rot called stress corrosion. This I found was awful enough, and decided to research other options to give my customers better quality jewelry. That was when I found out that in Europe, nickel had been banned in jewelry not because of its material problems, rather because it was so toxic! After doing more research I found out Nickel is a heavy metal that once it enters the body will never leave it. Once the body has accumulated too much toxic nickel, it can never touch it again or we break out in a rash. This why people have what are actually misinformed 'gold allergies.' Extremely rarely is anyone allergic to pure gold, it is stable and hypoallergenic. It is actually the alloys in the gold. Not only nickel; lead, cadmium (yes cadmium! The most toxic of the heavy metals with the dubious honor of being the 7th most toxic element on earth), ruthenium (a cancer causing mutagenic metal the body mistakes for iron and deposits in our bones), arsenic, mercury and zinc can be found mixed into the metals that make up jewelry. I was appalled, how could I be making money from such dangerous product?
After digging even deeper, I found countless toxic materials used every day in jewelry production. It was a horror list: boron, fluorine and potassium for soldering, ammonia for cleaning, cyanide for gold plating, hydrochloric acid and caustic soda for cleaning and it went on and on and on. Every week I wasl discovering a new health hazard. I was sick with the idea of how much compounded damage was being done to Jewelers, the planet, and the people who end up wearing the jewelry.
I was appalled, I was just about to open up a new studio and these are the materials I was going to be working with every day? No thanks. So I did what I always do when I want find something more environmentally friendly, typed in Eco friendly and added in jewelry. What I found was some companies trying, a few good people making a difference, but most of what out there despicable. Jewelry companies saying they're environmentally conscious because they use recycled gold, or maybe some went as far as using recycled packaging and signing no blood diamond promises (which is a crock for another entry). everywhere was information about the gold and diamond miners, but no one was talking about the heavy damage being caused by the production process itself. Even then, just because gold is recycled doesn't make it Eco conscious. In fact, some recycled gold is just as bad for the earth as mined gold. But who makes the distinction? Companies are clamoring to get the dollars out of peoples pockets, and if they can do it by fooling people, they will. Just because these companies claim to be green or Eco conscious does not make them so. Sadly, they are selling massive quantities of jewelry to people who have been misled into thinking it is.

The Abbey is not a business to make a profit. The Abbey is here to make a difference. To bring light to a dark and convoluted industry. To help open peoples eyes to the possibility of conscious, sustainable and toxin free jewelry that is made with love. Love over profits. I can buy that. If I can buy that, I feel comfortable offering it to the world. Even if I don't make a profit.

If changes aren't made, nothing will ever be changed.

There are many things more quantifiable, powerful, valuable, and worth living for than money.

First Leaf (1/24/11)

Where and when do we make the conscientious decision to no longer follow the main stream? How does it happen? Looking back, I don't know when I made it. It was a voice so tiny and small that said choose my own path, but I don't know when it first came into being. There have been countless small voices, small choices, small thoughts and small actions that have created a mountain of unshakable will inside me. Yet discovering wear it began is as unfathomable as the first leaf that created the forest. Somewhere back there in my history is a small voice that said do what is in my heart, I am thankful for that, and proud of my first small choice to follow it.

How I Design: Rough Sketches (2/6/11)

I don't see my designs completed in my head. That is, there is no complete picture and then I draw it out, rather I think in terms of parts, of ideas. I then find elements that fit with those ideas, as I draw and sketch them those elemental parts and ideas begin to flow and join into forming their own unique structure, their own design that belies the sum of the meanings that have been added together to create the piece, yet they continue beyond their own sum to create a new element, a new design that has an originality that can never be duplicated for the energy and meaning within the piece can never be duplicated.
I can't see the design before its made. I don't start with an answer and create the formula, rather I create the formula and like a child on Christmas morning unwrapping their first gift, eagerly await the answer.
I don't thong of a finished dish. I start with ingredients, thinking of how they go together, then create the recipe, and like the recipient can't wait to taste the final dish once my chefs have finished preparing it!
Basically, I pull together all the feelings, thoughts, symbols and story, put it together and step back, letting the story of the piece create itself. In a way this parallels the story of life: we live, we experience, and it is not until the end when we can put together our choices and their consequences that we can say this is the life lived. The Greeks saw the passing of time not as a river that flows before us, rather as a wave that cascades over our backs, and only after it has crashed over and passed us by can we see the wave.

Mad thoughts at the MAD Museum 8/31/2011

I think and think and think about the Abbey, I think until despair and the concrete mud of dejection fill me. I try to feel my way through these broken and tangled thoughts of why to continue, yet the feelings do not come. I am bereft of the balance between mind heart and soul to take one more breath of society, let alone another step deeper into its mire. Everywhere I look, society is a swamp of despair and destitution. Where is the dry and fertile ground to rest? To even think of rest I feel myself begin to sink, to think of going on my heart grows weary. So I plod on, my boots long ago sucked away, my clothes stripped and tattered by the brambles. I cannot stop, but I cannot go on. The blood flows from my punctured brow to form rivules through the caked detrious of human comfort. The buoyancy of my conviction will not let me sink, nor will my weakness of the flesh allow me to float up. I am in limbo between the worlds of man and dreams.