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50 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 EYELET LARIAT of sterling silver and colored aluminum; hollow constructed, fabricated, 2005. Below: EFFLUENCE NECKLACE of sterling silver and aquamarine; forged, fabricated, 2008. color with gemstones. Gold acknowledges that there are many more colored materials available to jewelers now, but at the time adding color through metal was pretty novel. Sheet aluminum presents numerous challenges as a material; it cannot be formed and reused in the same ways that gold and silver can, but she capitalizes on its physical assets, making the most of its color, light weight, and ability to be engraved. Working with aluminum had practical financial benefits as well. The material is inexpensive, which gave Gold more freedom to be experimental with design and scale: "when you reduce the investment, you have more freedom to just try a lot of different things and not worry about it." Similarly it allowed her to set a price point that allowed her patrons to be more adventurous in their choices as well. Also, because Gold marketed her work primarily through craft fairs for many years (she participated in over fifty American Craft Council shows), aluminum proved attractive because it presented less of a security issue while on the road. Many of Gold's designs, especially her earlier works, are distinctly postmodern in style. In the 1980s she incorporated color, pattern and a lot of rivets evoking built structures. Her works are similar in spirit to the decorative arts produced by Memphis Group artists, such as Ettore Sottsass, who were known for their unconventional and irreverent approach to design and use of bold colors, patterned surfaces, industrial materials, and asymmetry. Gold's aluminum brooches, which she began making in 1983, often are three-dimensional constructions suggesting skewed architectural settings through their use of flat planes of color, column-like rods, and angled sheets with hand- engraved patterns. Her earrings from this period combine sterling zigzags, colored aluminum tubes and rods, whimsical spirals, silver balls, rubber tubing, and flat planes of solid colors and engraved patterns. Many are constructed so that elements move, a feature emphasized and multiplied when the jewelry is actually worn, and they activate, figuratively and literally, the open spaces of their designs. One aluminum collar necklace and earring set, Tumblers from 1988, epitomizes this group of work. The collar is formed of a curved green rod, with smaller gold- colored rods attached in a seemingly random cascade down one side, paired with dark, folded geometric wedges engraved with lines and squares that echo the earrings. The asymmetrical design evokes a humorous sense of imminent collapse—a far cry from a traditional strand of pearls. While Gold still works with aluminum, by the late 1990s, she had shifted to sterling silver as her primary material "and demoted aluminum to splashes and accents of color." (She sometimes adds stainless steel for structural purposes.) Gold avoids anodizing aluminum herself because of the toxicity of the process, so much of her colored aluminum comes from found materials. She is amused by how trendy "repurposing" has become in the twenty-first century, but she simply began doing this as a practical solution to her material requirements. One form Gold made repeatedly, with many variations, from 1992 to 2010, is what she calls a charm necklace. These typically are long silver chains, square in cross-section, with varying combinations of sterling toroids (doughnut forms), flat silver shapes with pierced geometric decorations, colored aluminum tubes, rigid sterling zigzags or squiggles interrupting