Among things I never imagined doing, making jewelry in college ranks high on the list.
The course was actually a natural science class that’s open to the community as a workshop too. We learned about the chemistry and physics that go into near-alchemy glass phenomena. In addition to the physics and chemical reactions behind glass working, I learned fundamental techniques for crafting glass beads last semester. By the end of the endeavor, I realized I was working with serious materials that could place me alongside competent and professional jewelers (indeed, at least one of the people in the lab, Katherine*[spelling?], is a full-time artist and jeweler).
Many of our glass rods came from exotic and esteemed places like the Murano district of Italy and China (perhaps exotic for those not numbed by globalization). Our instructor taught workshops at the University of Toledo’s glass museum, and I worked with 22 karat gold leaf, sterling silver, and stainless steel.
The glass gets its color based on its chemical contents, and sold as glass rods. Heavy metals (things you don’t want to ingest a lot of like lead, etc.) are frequently used as opacifiers (to make the glass less transparent). History holds that some antique yellow glass vases would glow in the dark because of the uranium in them (I hear from other classes and conferences that uranium ore is yellow too). When we work with a “cobalt blue” rod, it appears cobalt blue especially because the rod of glass contains a fair amount of cobalt silicate or cobalt (II) aluminate. I’m guessing that it’s a radioactively stable isotope of cobalt. For beads with lead content, I now tend to seal beads with clear glass in case any potential health concerns do manifest.
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| The blue striping on the beads/pendant is “cobalt blue” (contains cobalt). The pendant is suspended with sterling silver, the crimps for the clasps are sterling silver as well, and the beads are threaded with stainless steel cable. |
1) As a class, we use about 5 tanks of acetylene (a natural gas) in one semester for our torches.
2) Globally, gold contributes to over 90% of mine production, and I suspect the precious metals and steel we used were not from recycled.
(Here’s the No Dirty Gold report I sourced that statistic from)
3) I definitely won’t use a lot of the glass for myself, but if it’s worth it for someone I’m very glad to make it. However, I refuse to craft kitsch.
Disclaimer: In some ways, I dislike getting into classical conservation issues like recycling and the accelerated anthropocentric climate crisis. They tend to boil down to basic education and responsibility, and people get pigeonholed as a very different kind of person known as an “environmentalist”. Recycling and climate change tend to miss a bigger picture in the scheme of life: we all have responsibilities that cannot be delegated to specialists. You don’t delegate your day-to-day responsibilities to a professional ethicist. Likewise, there are basic things that everyone can/should do that are not to be left for someone else to clean up after. Responsible environmental actions are a necessity in everyone’s life, the difference comes from the degree of insight, scale, and influence we knowingly interact with. You can go to an environmental scientist for insight, but don’t forget about the learned perspectives of everyone else in society.
1) Back to point 1 about natural gas consumption:
The first point probably has a stereotypical and common set of reasons for an environmental science major to be worried. Anthropocentric greenhouse gas combustion, natural gas consumption, which ties back to extraction (increased demand for fuel can add to impetus for fracking in the Great Lakes region [I’ll acknowledge natural gas as an enticing transition fuel, but when we get to the science of risk, impacts, and industry response, it’s very challenging to justify considering the proximity of these operations to our local drinking water supply]).
2) The second point really makes it meaningful for me–I’ve met people face to face, shook hands and embraced people who underwent (some continue to undergo) environmental injustices in Appalachia due to mountain top removal coal mining. Contrary to what most people would assume, they were still potentially willing to mine coal in other ways even at the risk of black lung disease. They weren’t willing to see their fruits and neighbors die from toxic water or silicosis.
3) Furthermore, people can only wear so much jewelry at a time, assuming that they’d even want to (I for one, barely wear a watch, and do so for practical purposes). Again, I refuse to craft kitsch–it’s frequently devoid of substance and rarely authentically communicates one’s intentional assertions of self-agency.
I find beauty through intrinsic and extrinsic circumstance of an event or entity–when both are there, it’s magic. Simple, complex, mysterious all at once. Glass as a medium captures this. The art is visual and for the creator, kinesthetic as well. I recall a [paraphrased] quote from a master Murano glass maker (sorry, I don’t recall his name, he’s in an early video about the history of glass making in 1960s):
“glass is the only medium I know that can be hard, yet fragile and malleable all at the same time”.
Curious to know the context of glass bead making among fine jewelers, I started looking around. I found several jewelers pricing two-bead earrings around $60-$80 a pair, and that necklaces can easily reach $800 or more. Considering the potential time, effort, energy and materials it takes to make glass, this actually makes sense.
That’s right, we (you the reader and I) now enter the domain of “what’s it really worth” we now ponder if a balance can ever exist between the priceless value of experiences and stories, the worth of the intrinsic materials, and whether the experience modifies the value of a material item. Indeed, there exist companies which drive so much into developing a “culture” and identity around their products, that their value is appreciated for the story. Surely the existence of an active customer fan-forum can be considered a milestone of success in enterprise. In the bead industry, see trollbeads. For parallels in consumer technology, I’ll merely mention “apple”; video games: “halo”.
Perhaps the greater creation behind these individual trinkets comes from the creation of a dynamic, living entity: the “community” which sustains meaning through the extrinsic discussion, exhibition, criticism, and occasional exaltation for particular items, artifacts, and ideas. The strength of any community belongs to the domain of invaluable relationships.
While capitalism and money may be myriad topics fraught with issue for deeply contemplative and compassionate comprehension, I’m convinced that the lifeblood of these systems amounts to a beguilingly simple notion: trust. I suspect most economists consider the value of our currencies, even an individual or institution’s faith in a good, service, or market resilience rely upon trust for arbitrary interest rates and belief in economic dogma. Yet the injustices inherent to both of these systems tend to violate the very basis of my conjecture for money and capitalism!
We must be looking at a wicked problem in its most worthy sense… [A wicked problem is a special kind of problem for complex systems thinkers. The link goes to previous posts that discuss or at least tangentially mention wicked problems with useful external links for more specific characterizations of wicked problems.]
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