Linda Kindler Priest Volume 46.2
ENDANGERED POLAR BEAR ON ICE (brooch/pendant) of silver, quartz crystal and white sapphires, 5.7 x 4.6 x 0.6 centimeters, 2023. ENDANGERED POLAR BEAR CUB ON ICE (brooch/pendant) of fourteen karat gold, quartz crystal, silver, and diamond, 4.8 x 4.4 x 0.6 centimeters, 2023. Photographs by the Artist. All pieces shown collection of the artist unless otherwise noted.
ENDANGERED PYGMY POSSUM (two-part brooch/pendant) of fourteen karat gold, pink sapphires, ocean jasper, and patinated silver, 8.9 x 3.8 centimeters, 2023.
Linda Kindler Priest understands that “everyone’s life is so busy now, and so full of things, that it’s hard to be aware of the environment.” But she is aware; she’s awed by nature. It started in the mid-1980s with the birds in a nearby wildlife sanctuary where she studied the egrets, herons, hawks, and finches, carefully recreating them as small, repoussé gold and stone jewelry. She also likes to observe the critters in her yard in Bedford, Massachusetts, from a scampering squirrel that paused on her doorstep to the various insects visiting the wildflowers. She told Metalwerx (a non-profit jewelry school and studio), “All of them have ended up in a piece of jewelry—including a mosquito, which was of course set with a blood red colored stone.”
Priest is classically trained in art, having studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, which was founded as the School of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1876, and is now part of Tufts University. A skilled draftsperson, she begins with sketches, noting, “If I can’t capture [the animal] two-dimensionally, then it will be a struggle all along.” She considers the overall forms and volumes, and seeks to capture the personality and gesture of a living being.
Priest roughly draws her design on the back of a sheet of gold (or sometimes silver), then rests the metal on a bowl filled with pitch, a tar-like substance that provides a pliable surface into which she can delicately pound it. Priest uses her variety of specialized hammers to slowly, painstakingly form a relief of the animal from the back—an ancient technique known as repoussé. By repeatedly annealing the metal to keep it malleable, using increasingly precise tools, and sometimes hammering from the front (a technique called chasing), she crafts her animals, taking up to fifty hours on a single work. Priest creates jewelry that is highly individual, “I try to capture the essence of each living being in metal.… The process allows my personality to be embedded into the sculpture.”
The results are both timeless—she employs the same basic materials and approaches that a jeweler would have used hundreds of years ago—and modern, with abstract, asymmetrical shapes forming the silhouettes for each piece of jewelry. Priest does not place her animals in perfectly formed arches or tidy squares; instead, the outlines respond to each animal’s specific pose—the squirrel monkey leans forward eagerly, its profile suggesting the rounded edge of the gold, with an empty, angled space above its back, while the Frosted Elfin’s head and arcing antennae just break the rectilinear frame as if it is about to fly away.
LINDA KINDLER PRIEST.
Priest pairs her animals with carefully selected minerals, crystals and precious stones that she chooses not for their carats or clarity, but for how they can add meaning and context and create appropriate environments. Sometimes pearls become bubbles, quartz crystals become ice, and mottled green stones suggest sun dappled forest floors. She often relies on the natural beauty of the stones rather than fancy facets, which are usually reserved for small highlights like the bioluminescent glow of an angler fish’s lure. Maybe the stones are from the same part of the world as the animal or share a color scheme or a name. She even studied lapidary (the art of stonecutting) in the early 1990s so that she could have more control over this aspect of her work.
Around 2006, Priest began making two-part brooches, with the animal on top and a related stone beneath. They may be worn separately but are designed as a pair and can be displayed in a frame when not being worn.
“The two-part brooch format enables me to illustrate my intentions two different ways: the sculpted repoussé image [and] the contrasting or complementary expression abstracted by using colors, textures, and patterns in large stones.” She describes her work as “small sculptures” and with them seeks “a balance of imagery, materials, color and form.”
Many of Priest’s works feature familiar, conventional animals—rabbits, bees and a porcupine, for instance—but by the late 2010s, she began in earnest to build an endangered species collection. (Actually, her first endangered species was a pangolin in 2016, which she selected not because it was endangered, but because its dragon-like scales intrigued her; she was surprised when this odd little animal sold.) Describing a species as endangered means that it faces the likelihood of extinction in the near future. These species are threatened primarily by habitat loss, as well as factors like climate change, competition from invasive species, loss of genetic variation, pollution, and poaching. The best-known listing regarding the conservation status of species is the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, which classifies biological species from “least concern” and “near threatened,” through “vulnerable,” “endangered,” and “critically endangered,” to “extinct in the wild” and “extinct.” The United States Endangered Species Act can designate plants and animals as endangered or threatened as well, and there are also recognitions at the country, state and local levels. Priest refers to all of these—perusing books and websites—when identifying and learning about the animals she will highlight through her jewelry.
ENDANGERED TARSIER “HOLDING ON” (two-part brooch/pendant) of fourteen karat gold, chrysoprase, ocean jasper, and patinated silver, 7.4 x 4.1 centimeters, 2020.
She wrote, “From little bugs to big animals, some living beings are on the verge of extinction. All are incredible creatures, unique in all sorts of ways.” Some of her endangered animals and their plights are well known, like polar bears, but others are less familiar, including pygmy possums, which she describes warmly as “adorable little things!” Priest has never viewed one in real life, but the images she encountered of it charmed her. She explains, “It’s a little, itty-bitty animal about an inch long, and it was so small! The first time I saw it, it was sitting on a leaf.”
Pygmy possums are a family of tiny tree-dwelling marsupials, with five extant species, four of which are found only in Australia, and one of which, the mountain pygmy possum, is recognized by the IUCN Red List as critically endangered. It faces habitat loss and the reduction of an essential food source, the bogong moth. Priest acknowledges that the pygmy possum looks similar to the (also endangered) Rondo dwarf galago, a diminutive primate that is only found in a small area of Tanzania, but that there are differences in the size, the shape of the ears, and the roundness of the face, adding that “it’s important to respect the differences.… It’s kind of nice, we’re all different.”
One of Priest’s early endangered species was the tarsier. “It was this cute little animal with big eyes, and I thought, what a shame if something happened to it. If it didn’t exist.” Tarsiers are small nocturnal primates in the family Tarsiidae that live in the islands of Southeast Asia, reside in trees and eat mostly insects; all the species are endangered or threatened. “My fourteen karat repoussé tarsier is holding on for dear life on a branch of chrysoprase, which is the top part of a two-part brooch. The bottom brooch’s ocean jasper is set in patinated silver and represents the rich colors of the forest.” The chrysoprase suggests a green branch, with part in the top section of the brooch with the tarsier and part in the bottom; for Priest, the symbolism respects the tarsier and its environment, while also indicating that “something’s broken.”
ENDANGERED ASIAN AROWANA FISH (brooch/pendant) of fourteen karat gold, sapphire, and diamond, 3.2 x 4.8 centimeters, 2019.
ENDANGERED FROSTED ELFIN (brooch/pendant) of patinated silver, smoky quartz crystal, champagne diamonds, and fourteen karat gold, 5.8 x 3.6 x 0.6 centimeters, 2020. Private collection.
Priest hopes that these works will help bring attention to biodiversity and the fragility of life—that they will start a conversation. She says, in a gentle voice, that her brooches and pendants featuring these endangered animals are “a nice way to talk about something bad.” She focuses on creatures that she relates to, and generally ones that are charismatic. As an artist with a practical understanding of the market (and an offbeat sense of humor), she adds, “There are some things that are blobular that I don’t do, because who would buy a blob?”
One butterfly brooch found a particularly apt home with a recently retired entomologist in Massachusetts. Priest created the Frosted Elfin Brooch in patinated silver and paired it with a smoky quartz of a similar burnished tone; she added two tiny brown diamonds at the tops of its long, curving antennae for “a little sparkle.” She believes that sometimes gold can overpower the imagery, and for this small, unflashy brown butterfly, silver felt like a better choice. The Frosted Elfin, which is protected under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act, lives in small, localized communities and does not migrate; it relies on specific habitats that are being lost due to construction and through the suppression of natural fires that are needed to maintain balance in certain ecosystems.
Priest’s endangered species collection also includes the Asian Arowana, a fish with distinctive large metallic-colored scales, which she paired with a deep blue sapphire to suggest the blackwater rivers it lives in. Recognized on the IUCN Red List as endangered, these freshwater fish face declining habitat due to environmental destruction. Another Australian (and New Guinean) animal from the group is the Echidna, which has four species extant, with two listed as critically endangered—Sir David’s long-beaked echidna (after David Attenborough) and the western long-beaked echidna. (Fun fact: young echidnas are called puggles!) These animals, with “needles like a porcupine and pouches like a kangaroo,” and platypuses are the only egg-laying mammals. Priest notes that her echidna “is standing on an ethereal looking [Australian boulder] opal whose opalescence fades away. Both… are representations of how precious and ephemeral life is. Both express my fear that they will disappear.”
Three Arctic dwellers appear in Priest’s endangered species collection: a polar bear, a polar bear cub and the Arctic fox. Polar bears are designated on the IUCN Red List as vulnerable because of habitat loss caused by climate change; the reduction of sea ice makes it harder for them to hunt for food, leading to malnutrition or starvation. Though Arctic foxes are not listed on the IUCN Red List as endangered, certain populations and subspecies are threatened; their thick white fur does not provide camouflage when the snow melts, and red foxes are expanding into their territory and killing them. (Sometimes environments change faster than official designations.) For all of these, Priest pairs the animals with quartz crystals that suggest the faceted ice formations where they should thrive.
ENDANGERED AMERICAN PIKA (brooch/pendant) of fourteen karat gold, smoky quartz crystal, patinated silver, and diamond, 5.1 x 4.1 centimeters, 2020.
Similarly, the American pika (a small mammal related to rabbits) is not officially listed as endangered, but because of its narrow habitat requirements (high elevation boulder fields and alpine meadows in western North America with cool temperatures—they can die if exposed to temperatures above 77.9 degrees Fahrenheit for more than six hours—it is often considered an indicator species for climate change. Rising temperatures affect when it can gather food and what food is available during that shrinking window. Priest placed her pika on a rocky ground of smoky quartz crystal with a pair of earthy brown sparkling diamonds.
Priest is cautious about selecting endangered animals; she has to relate to it and to feel that she can present it respectfully. But, once she decides on an animal, she is devoted to it. Does she have a favorite? No, “in a way they are all my children.” And, each time she sells a work from this series, she makes a donation to the Endangered Species Coalition. She is also fully committed to her art, and when asked how she spends her free time, Priest laughed and replied, “Actually, I work an awful lot. I do… but I enjoy working… I love creating, and I want to keep on doing it.” She believes that jewelry can make a difference, remarking, “Every little bit helps.” She hopes that depicting these endangered animals in a reverential (and beautiful!) way will make more people think about them and want to protect them.
SUGGESTED READING
“A Conversation with Linda Kindler Priest,” Art Jewelry Vol. 9, No. 6 (September 2013): 46-48.
Dinoto, Andrea. “The Peaceable Kingdom of Linda Kindler Priest,” Metalsmith Vol. 38, No. 2 (2018): 44-51.
Katz, Rachel V. “Light as a Feather,” Lapidary Journal Vol. 52, No. 4 (July 1998): 42-45.
—“Linda Kindler Priest,” Ornament Vol. 22, No. 4 (1999): 28-29.
Little, Carl. “Linda Kindler Priest: A Classic Menagerie,” Ornament Vol. 31, No. 1 (2007): 50-53.
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Ashley Callahan is an independent scholar and curator in Athens, Georgia, with a specialty in modern and contemporary American decorative arts. She has an undergraduate degree from Sewanee and a Master’s degree in the history of American decorative arts from the Smithsonian and Parsons. Her publications include Frankie Welch’s Americana: Fashion, Scarves, and Politics (UGA Press, 2022), Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion (UGA Press, 2015), and, as co-author, Crafting History: Textiles, Metals, and Ceramics at the University of Georgia (Georgia Museum of Art, 2018). Callahan met Linda Kindler Priest at the Atlanta Contemporary Jewelry Show, where she had the pleasure of holding Priest’s delicate brooches and admiring their craftsmanship and materials up close. Though completely focused on jewelry during the event, Priest later assured Callahan that she does have other interests—reading mysteries and biographies, going to antique and consignment stores with a friend “as if it were a quest for hidden treasure,” visiting museums and the Boston Philharmonic, and working in her yard when it’s not too cold.
