Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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24 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 W ood seems never to have been a favored material for jewelrymaking, even in those regions of the world where its scarcity might reasonably have given it connotations of preciousness. At any rate, precious few examples survive to form a historical record. Perhaps the long practice of treating wood as fuel to be expended for cooking and heating or as material to form the sturdy hafts of workaday farming tools made it seem as common as clay, another material that has never been widely exploited in wearable ornament. Even for Daniel DiCaprio, whose work for the past six years has consisted almost exclusively of carved brooches and earrings, wood has not been a mainstay for its inherent aesthetic qualities or the ease with which it can be turned into jewelry. On the contrary, some of the very properties of wood that can make it a recalcitrant medium have appealed to DiCaprio. "If wood isn't carved right, if you're not working with its natural characteristics," he observes, "it will break. If it gets wet and you haven't sealed it properly, it will crack. I've enjoyed it because I've liked some of those limitations." As a student in the metalsmithing MFA program at East Carolina University, DiCaprio felt free to explore nontraditional materials and techniques. At the outset of his graduate studies in 2006 his work consisted of copper and silver vessels elaborated through chasing and repoussé to create skin-like surfaces. Reducing the scale of these to about an inch in height in an effort to make them viable for wearing, he began to feel somewhat constrained by the material and to consider other potential media. Wood seemed logical. "Every semester of the three years that I was at East Carolina University I took a woodshop class," he explains. "My professor, Terry Smith, was inspired by the big-block carving t e c h n i q u e s o f t h e 1 9 7 0 s , laminating pieces together and carving down to make the form. I made small sculptures and furniture, but D N I E L D I C P R I O