High jewelry artist Margery Hirschey designs and fabricates pieces that feel like the voices one sometimes hears in the last moments of the trance-state, dreaming, just before waking. The allure of her work arrives slowly, without bling. Hirschey hand-constructs high-karat gold earrings, rings and necklaces that unfold before our eyes, eluding the obvious, challenging expectation.

Understanding Hirschey’s technique and process is where her enchantment begins. She generally eschews cire-perdue, or lost wax casting, the common method of producing metal objects by pouring molten gold or silver into a mold. A couple of rare exceptions on her Instagram: a heavy, solid sterling silver male torso to wear as a pendant, modeled after Michelangelo’s David, and hand-shaped pendants modeled in sterling silver after the artist’s own right and left hands.

 Casting allows for easy replication, making it the obviously convenient choice for mass-production. Instead, she chooses to fabricate each piece using an array of painstaking construction techniques: drilling with micro drill-bits, sawing, filing, piercing, soldering, burnishing, polishing, buffing. Her raw materials are sheets of flat stock (meaning sheets of precious metal), a candy-box of precious gemstones, both cabochon and faceted, gold wire, and infernally high heat in the form of a high-temperature jeweler’s torch. The saw-blade used to cut out the base of a pendant or the back of a ring, or to create an opening in a sculptured form, is featherweight. When Soolip interviewed Hirschey via Zoom in her Boulder, Colorado home studio recently, we asked how she keeps the whisper-thin blade from breaking as she works. Her reply with a dry chuckle was, “Oh, I break a few.” The thinner the blade, the more precise the cut, and the higher the likelihood of snapping mid-stroke.

The jeweler’s saw is an implement of sorcery, unchanged in basic design for centuries. The blade is fitted into a simple handle, and screwed into place until the tension feels—and sounds—right.  There are no electronics or other modern appliances to help the jeweler tell when the blade is correctly set. A knowing jeweler may pluck the blade like a psalmist, listening for a sweet-sounding “ping” that says the blade is at the right tension, tightening and tuning the tool like a harp. For millennia, jewelry artists have dabbed a bit of beeswax on the blade as lubricant, adding to the sweetness. Many modern jewelers prefer vegetable oil.

Looking at the edge of a jeweler’s saw blade is a revelation. The teeth of the blade alternate in a right-left pattern called a set. This means that a saw blade doesn’t “cut” the way a knife-blade cuts: saw-blades instead weaken and then chip small particles of the metal away, and the alternating pattern of teeth allows the chips of metal to fall away on both sides of the blade. The blade is placed on the metal with the teeth facing down, sharp side toward the artist, and the slicing motion resembles a bird’s wing-beat. The perfect cut is the result of breath and tension, maneuvering the brittle edge through hard metal. Rough edges are rasped and rubbed smooth. Stones are set into place with a band of heated metal called a bezel, which must be pressed, stretched, pushed and pulled around the base of the gem while still warm using a burnishing tool, much the way a confectioner wraps a bon-bon in soft fondant without a single flaw. Unskilled bezel-making leaves unsightly crimps and tattle-tale gaps, and there is no recourse but to start over, which may be dangerous: too much pressure may cause the gem to chip or fracture. And even in the hands of a master, the metal tools leave marks, so erasing any trace of the fabrication process is essential.  The mark of a virtuoso is, in fact, no mark at all.

In Hirschey’s work, sawed elements are joined by gold solder and the flame of the torch. Hirschey typically works with 22 karat gold, occasionally 18 karat. She says, “I never use 14 karat. It doesn’t have a good color. And to me, it always looks like, you know, jewelry-store jewelry.”

The high karat makes specific demands on the technical aspects of fabrication, another reason that conventional jewelers prefer to cast their work. Soldering irons can’t be used, since working with high-karat gold (above 14 karat) requires higher temperatures, as well as specific solder with a high gold count. This high gold-content solder is stronger than lower gold-content solders, and requires a higher heat from an oxy-acetylene or butane gas torch. In every way, working with 18 and 22 karat gold raises the temperature of the piece.

The application of flux, to cleanse the metal’s surface, and soldering, require a neurological dance of consummate fine motor control, timing and restraint. Too much solder applied to a joint, for example, leaves an unsightly bump that will need to be filed away to produce a silk-smooth, invisible join. The process requires careful ventilation, eye-protection and fireproof gear.  All of these decisions and steps, and many more, literally make each piece from Hirschey’s work-bench one-of-a-kind, unlike cast pieces which are far easier to produce.

Hirschey’s approach to gemstones is highly individualistic. She says simply, “I buy stones I like.” Boulder Opal, Aquamarine, Pink and Red Tourmaline, Violet Sapphire, Rutilated Quartz, Turquoise, Emeralds, and deliciously gnarly Baroque Pearls are among her favorites. She avoids Opals with too much fire, she says, because they look fake.  Unlike many jewelers, she never uses what are called doublets, meaning a slice of Opal glued to a dark plastic backing, preferring the organic wholeness that some jewelry-lovers may consider imperfect. “I love ballet, and I always liked to watch the rehearsal more than seeing the final performance,” she says. “I like seeing the sweat on the dancer’s bodies. I like remembering where that all of that power comes from.” 

Her shoulder-dusting chandelier earrings in particular may convert even the most stalwart minimalist into a sudden leap of shimmering extravagance. Sweeps of gently asymmetrical gems, grouped by color (often radiant pinks and lilacs), are gathered into playful mismatches, with ovals, rounds and circles of differing proportions joined to sway along the neck and cast jewel-light onto the skin. “My earrings are always sisters, not twins,” she says. 

Historically, high jewelry, as it’s known, was created for the ruling class alone. The perceived value of the precious metals and gems used in its creation sent a clear message of status, asserting this declaration through repetition: row upon row of perfectly matched gems and ornaments in mirror-perfect symmetry, like the booming movements of a grand symphony. Make no mistake about it, such pieces tell us, I’m kind of a big deal.

By contrast, Hirschey’s work riffs with our senses like jazz: irreverent, buoyant, unpretentious, freewheeling. The fact that her pieces are rendered in the rarest, most expensive materials on earth makes their exuberance truly radical.

“Lots of young women like the minimalist thing,” she says. “Part of it may be budget. Gold, especially high-karat, is not inexpensive. And also, when your hands are young and smooth, you just may not want as much. I like super-dainty pieces, that are just a spark of fire on the skin, like at the base of throat, or I like more massive statements.  I don’t like anything in-between.” 

Hirschey grew up on Long Island, New York, and earned her fine arts degree with the initial intention of pursuing a career in fashion design. Many of her forms suggest the expressive canvases of Kandinsky and Klee, but she prefers making objects to painting. “I crave making things,” she says, including sewing and tatting.

She received no formal training in metalwork or jewelry production, and has always been self-funded. When she first tentatively approached the jewelry buyer at Bergdof Goodman in 2007, the answer was yes.  That initial purchase of 12 pieces quickly escalated to an order for 50 items for a first trunk show, unlikely at the height of the recession. Awards, accolades and other prestigious retail partnerships soon followed.

All images courtesy of Margery Hirschey.