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Submerged Forest Earrings
$158
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Submerged Forest Necklace
$248
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Chilean artist Vania Ruiz uses seaweed and seeds—embedded in resin and framed in sterling silver—to evoke the volcanic rock and submerged trees of the Dead Forest around Chile’s Hudson Volcano. Her haunting, one-of-a-kind micro landscapes are pieces of wearable art that honor nature’s powers of rebirth and renewal. Earrings feature 22k-gold painted accents.
Chilean artist Vania Ruiz trained as an architect, but found her true calling as a jewelry designer after studying goldsmithing and learning to work with resin.
“Suddenly everything began to make sense,” says Ruiz, “the calm I felt while I was drawing, the need to build ideas with my hands, memories of playing in the botanical gardens with my mother and making mermaids out of tree bark or building little sculptures from branches and seeds.”
Ruiz collects unconventional natural materials on her travels, in her neighborhood, and from local markets and uses them to create wearable works of art.
She is drawn to working with resin because of the way it allows her to play with light. The reflections and transparency make resin not just a canvas for her mixed media vision, but an essential element of the composition. Ruiz's architectural training informs the structure of her pieces. "The resin reminds me a lot of reinforced concrete," she says of the challenge of pouring resin into shapes made of sterling silver.
Each piece is handcrafted by Ruiz in her home studio in Viña del Mar, on Chile’s Pacific coast. Seeds, twigs, seaweed, alpaca fiber, and more all become part of these small worlds, each with a story to tell.
