Santa Fe, NM - LewAllen Contemporary is pleased to announce its representation of jewelry artist Carolyn Morris Bach, whose elegant and enigmatic creations have for many years now been avidly sought and beloved by collectors as adornment while also being recognized for their excellence in design and craftsmanship in exhibitions at such prestigious institutions as the Smithsonian and the American Craft Museum.
Bach is widely regarded as one of the finest art jewelers working today. Her work has appeared not only in lapidary and other specialty journals but also in the pages of Elle, Vogue, Bazaar, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Metropolitan Home, and a number of other lifestyle magazines.
Exquisitely wrought of 18k and 22k gold, fine silver and copper and often accented with pearls or gemstones, Bach's work frequently references the natural world. In particular, tiny creatures with solemn or half-smiling, ovoid or moon-shaped faces of ivory - Bach's signature motif - seem suffused with the totemic significance of older iconographies in which visual metaphors represent the powers of sun, moon, wind, rain, stones, plants, and animals,
Such examples of Bach's work seem to reference a tale, either mythic or allegorical, while also imparting a sense of protecting the wearer from harm, like an amulet. A reviewer (Leslie Clark, in Americna Craft magazine) commented on both these aspects of her work in 2005, noting the "druidical allusiveness" and "companionableness" of these enigmatic creatures. The reviewer praised Bach's "superlative skills as an artist and a metalsmith," opining that "each piece is thoughtfully articulated and constructed, incorporating wrapped hinges that move with the wearer" and also noting "a spare, poetic beauty that offsets the richness of her materials and simultaneously bars any sentimentality from the narrative and metaphorical meanings."
Bach lives on seventy rural acres in southern New England. Surrounded by pastures and forests, and directly affected by the cycles of the seasons, she says she feels intimately connected to the natural environment. This experience finds visual expression in her designs. She describes a personal dialogue with her stones and metals throughout the journey from her inspirations through their transformations at the workbench and forge, and she believes her work is not complete until it reaches and adorns the wearer. "Jewelry-as-art depends as much on function and intimacy as it does on image," she has said. "If the work ignores wrists, necks, earlobes, fingers, lapels and is directed instead toward its photographic reproduction in a magazine or the isolation of a museum display case, it risks its identity: as adornment."
Bach holds a BFA in Jewlery/Metalsmithing from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is in important public collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and the Racine Art Museum, Racine Wisconsin. Several pieces are in the Sandy Grotta Jewelry Collection, one of the most important private collections of contemporary jewelry, now being documented by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City for publication and a future exhibition.
LewAllen Contemporary is open 9:30 - 5:30 Monday through Thursday, 9:30 - 6:30 Friday and Saturday, and 11:00 - 5:00 Sunday. Carolyn Morris Bach's New Work will begin Friday, August 3, and continue through Sunday, August 19. An artist's reception for this exhibition andn concurrent gallery exhibitions of work by Darren Vigil Gray and Ramona Sakiestewa will be held at the start of Indian Market Weekend, on Friday, August 17. For further information please contact Diane Kell at (505) 988-8997 or [email protected].
