From the Exhibition:
A
View from the Jeweler’s Bench: Ancient Treasures, Contemporary Statements
The jeweler’s bench adheres to a simple design scheme. It is a wooden structure approximately four feet long, two feet wide, and three feet high, somewhat taller than your average office desk. A few more details round off this picture. A semicircular shape is cut into the center of the worktop along its front-facing edge. A built-in tray, or sling, sits just above the jeweler’s lap to catch metal filings. Drawers on either side of the bench are used to organize the files, punches, drill bits, and saw blades, to name a few types of common tools that a maker needs to have within easy reach.
As a furniture form, this bench seems pretty straightforward. Basically, it’s a compact working surface with storage compartments, yet it’s arguably lacking in glamour and excitement as an object in and of itself. So why would a curator choose this commonplace, utilitarian piece of furniture as the narrative framework for an exhibition that prompts new perceptions about jewelry through works by contemporary artists and jewelry-making methods? What is compelling about the view from a jeweler’s bench?
A cognitive shift happens when we swap out prepositions. An
artisan doesn’t just sit down at this
bench. The hemisphere cut into its worktop, in fact, brings the body of the
artisan into the bench. This intimate
positioning of the body and bench can be seen in the mid-eighteenth-century
plate of the jeweler’s workshop from Diderot’s Encyclopédie
(fig. 1).
Let’s consider how this relationship between body and bench plays out in the context of the jewelry-making process. The artisan, for example, sits down on a wheeled stool and pushes herself into position within the bench’s curve. The bench peg, a V-shaped wooden piece that is clamped to the edge of the worktop, is directly in front of her, at chest level. She reaches into a drawer by her side and pulls out a jeweler’s saw frame, an elongated C-shaped metal tool with a wooden handle. She also extracts a saw blade from a little bundle of them; it is just over five inches long and as slender as a stalk of grass. She places the end of the handle against her breastbone for support as she leans into the saw frame, whose top she has wedged into the V of the bench peg. This action makes the saw’s metal frame flex, just a little, while she attaches the blade by tightening screws at the top and bottom of the C, securing it in place. She eases back her weight, and the saw frame becomes rigid again, pulling the blade taut. As she holds the saw up to her ear, she tests the tension of the blade by plucking it like a guitar string: it gives a strong, ringing twang. (Too high a pitch means that the blade is too taut and will snap within a few strokes; a wobbly sound means that it is too loose and will bend under pressure and not cut the metal properly.) Satisfied, she places the piece of gold that she has been working on onto the bench peg. Her fingers act like a clamp, holding down the metal piece as she lets the saw in her other hand take its first bite of gold with a firm, vertical downstroke.
The bench supports a system of activities, as well as the body of knowledge that structures the techniques of jewelry making. Its function prompts us to think of the bench as a form of technology, in terms of determining the ways in which actions interconnect and affect the organization, procedures, and mindset of the artisan. Materials also give sensual feedback as they are being worked, such as conveying the feeling of sudden, sharp heat generated by the friction of sawing the gold. Or how the sound of the steady rasp of metal being sawed abruptly changes tone and speed as the blade approaches its terminus. Each jewelry-making process, in fact, produces its own distinctive sound, like the sharp staccato of a ball-peen hammer versus the thud of the rawhide mallet on metal being shaped on an anvil. The rasp-and-click of the striker as it’s made to spit out the sparks that ignite the hissing stream of propane released from the soldering torch. The strange choking sound of hot metal being quenched. The mechanical whirrings and buzzings of the flex shaft with its suite of little rotary tools for grinding, drilling, and polishing. The rhythmic sound grating of a file tearing up metal as it is pushed along a surface. The workshop becomes a sensorium of experimental music.
Sasha Nixon MA’18, the curator of the exhibition, was right to place the jeweler’s bench at the heart of her exhibition. It structures the life cycle of jewelry making and the creative process—from what goes into the workshop as raw material to be worked into diverse forms, to what comes out as finished pieces. I think it is fair to say that every piece of jewelry you encounter shares the bench as a central feature of its origin.
Donna Bilak, director of 12 Keys Consultancy & Design LLC, is a historian of early modern science as well as a jeweler. An alumna of the Bard Graduate Center’s doctoral program and a former fellow in Columbia University’s Making and Knowing program, she taught “What is Jewelry History?” at BGC in spring 2019.
