Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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42 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 shifts our way of thinking and focuses us on the present," Reyes explains. He contrasts wood with silver and gold, which he describes as having connotations with the future or the past. Both precious metals have a far longer shelflife, and their monetary value means they can be purchased to fund one's future, or passed from generation to generation, thus an anchor to the past. With wood, he says, "It's about living with it now while we're alive and treasuring it." The temporal nature of the material creates this understanding of finitude. Yet it is a finite existence which can still span eras. "The materials can go from five-thousand-year-old bog oak to fifty-thousand-year-old wood from New Zealand," Reyes urgently relates. "These are trees that the last ice age knocked over, and when they do land development, they take this material, move it, and put it into a landfill." This disturbance of the natural process, particularly the taking of a precious substance and disposing of it as garbage, is somewhat anathema to Reyes. "To be able to salvage that wood from going into the landfill, with all the history that it has," he almost despairs. "It's the oldest workable wood in the world." In exploring the capacity of wood, Reyes has experimented with many elements. Most of the time, he uses just one piece to form a bangle or a brooch, spiraling lustrous woods like cherry into lovely spring-like forms. Variations come like branches of a tree; a spring-like cherry wood bangle gets flattened into an intertwining braided bracelet, or layered on top of itself to become a brooch of concentric circles. He then plays with the pinback, countering expectation by bringing it to the front as a design element in itself. He will move on to using three pieces of wood, joining them together with lap joints, a technique used in furniture making. Again, he undermines the norm, by making a piece with curved parts, which are traditionally structurally weak, but when fortified by the lap joint process becomes robust. Reyes's explanation of his design process is rooted in the ever present act of inspiration, that eternal moment of time that existed in the ancient past through to the contemporary. "One of the stories that informs my work is a flute that was discovered that is thirty-five thousand years old. It's from a bone of a vulture. Picture these guys sitting around a campfire, and he's sucking on the bone of this vulture and it makes a noise. This noise is the first noise they've heard that sounds like this, so it's a spark of GUSTAV REYES and his wood stock, taken at his former studio in 2011. Photographs: Patrick R. Benesh-Liu. ORGANIC COIL of cherry wood, Limited Edition Bracelet Collection, 7.62 x 12.7 x 7.62 centimeters, 2010. Photograph: Lauren Bost.