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Alluvial Deposits (after Carboplatin chemotherapy)
July 26, 2023

Alluvial Deposits (after Carboplatin chemotherapy)

This poem is part of a series in which I explore traditional jewelry materials and the ways in which they relate to the body. When I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, I tried to keep my material curiosity alive by tracing the medicines back to their roots, in this case the element platinum. I thought a lot about how systems within the body mimic systems without, veins and arteries echo streams and rivers, sediments accumulate in silt and bone. Thank you to Metalsmith Magazine for inviting me to publish this poem. 

 

Alluvial Deposits (after Carboplatin chemotherapy)

 

My friend with size 12 fingers insists on platinum 

so I set to work carving wedding ring from wax block

refining the crude hacks of my handsaw 

with a file and a multitude of sandpapers.

 

It weighs barely a gram, this brittle model

but transformed into metal it will become 

a heavy ballast, it will right the ship,

at least that is what my friend imagines.

 

I carve slashes into satiny 600-grit surface

as if it has been mauled by a bear my friend directs me

he is watching a Werner Herzog movie 

about caves and signs, man and animal.

 

He wants the animal present in the ring I craft.  

I could hone a bear claw, make a tiny tool

become a Wild Thing scratching at ring’s surface

instead, I use precision tungsten burrs to engrave an ursine alphabet.  

 

II

 

What constitutes treasure is subject to interpretation. 

Aguirre, spun round on a river raft, searching 

for El Dorado. The contents of the treasure chest

are usually gold and gems, perhaps feathers

ink, bone, water.

 

I’ve never seen a chest full of silver’s dull, heavy relative

 

But I’ve tasted it. Platinum flowed through my veins.

I have known it to be a precise poison

that lingers still

as heavy metals do.

 

When my living is done 

when blood and bile leach back into earth

when my seas evaporate

and my fascia lets go

the well-built pyre of my bones

will reach substantial temperatures

capable of drawing platinum out

and you will find that all along  

deep in marrow   hair follicle 

it’s been mating with the gold.



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Conversations in the Middle - Metalsmith Magazine article
April 06, 2023

Conversations in the Middle - Metalsmith Magazine article

I’ve written an article that appears in the new issue of Metalsmith Magazine available digitally or in print. The piece asks the question, How to begin again?, in the studio and beyond. I hope you’ll read the stories about the three artists I profile in the piece.

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Friendly Tides Exhibition at Marin Civic Center
February 27, 2023

Friendly Tides Exhibition at Marin Civic Center

 

Friendly Tides at Marin Civic Center 

Feb 6th - May 18th

Reception: Thursday, March 16th, 5:00-7:00pm

Friendly Tides showcases the work of artists from Marinship Studios, a studio complex in the Marinship neighborhood of Sausalito, California. Located on a site that has been a beacon of creativity for artists, philosophers, writers, and poets since the 1950’s, it has been a workplace and residence for the likes of Maya Angelou, Gordon Onslow Ford, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Varda and Ruth Asawa among others. Marinship Studios was founded in an effort to continue this creative history and support the arts in the Bay Area.

The neighborhood of Marinship began as a shipyard during WWII before blossoming into a creative enclave defined by houseboats, marine businesses and the ebbs and flows of the bay. The title of the show - Friendly Tides -  is a nod to the neighborhood’s inextricable link to the tides of the bay and how everyone in the community is impacted by them for both good and ill. All on the waterfront are subject to the pull of the tides, especially when the seasonal king tides threaten to breach our doorways. Many buildings flood during these times, recently including the studios of some of the artists presented here.

In addition to Sausalito's very tangible shores, Friendly Tides also refers to the tidal force of artists in the Bay Area. Unlike many art scenes, it is common here for artists to include the work of their friends and peers in their exhibitions out of an instinct for making space for others and sharing conversations with one another. In this spirit the exhibition includes a group of works by artists from Sausalito and the greater Bay Area who are friends of Marinship Studios. We watch the waterfront to live with the movement of the bay, but we are the friendly tide.

Marinship Studios Artists

Mary Button Durell

Tania Houtzager

Maya Kini

Ari Lurie

Susan McKiney

Daniel Melo Morales

Bay Area Artists

Matt Goldberg

Tracy Kessler

Lynn Marie Kirby

Anna Landa 

Natasha Lowey

Cait Malloy

Beril Or

France Viana

 

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Poems, for Now
October 21, 2022

Poems, for Now

River Heron Review published my poem, After the Fires, a Wild and Reckless Flowering in its most recent open access issue. You can read it here    

 

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On Mexico and Making
September 22, 2022

On Mexico and Making

The pulse of artesania in Mexico, (translated into English as handicrafts but for which no real translation exists), has been at the center of my experience with jewelry.

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SHIBUMI GALLERY MAY 7TH - JUNE 2022
May 01, 2022

SHIBUMI GALLERY MAY 7TH - JUNE 2022

Come see new work and say hello to me on Saturday May 7th 4-7 pm at Shibumi Gallery on 4th street in Berkeley, CA

A bit of lore that I absorbed during a year studying in Italy was that in the city of Padua, they filter the water to catch gold. “Make work that is like trying to hold water in your hands”, a teacher of mine instructed. In both of these images, a desire to catch a fleeting, precious material, to extract the poem from an ocean of words, the gem from the mountain of rock.

The sense that material is moving is what moves me to make and unmake. A goldsmith transforms material with relative ease. Controlled flames undo most things. The pieces in this show are odes to the elements of my material alphabet. With roots in the navaratna, a jewelry object consisting of nine gemstones, this language consists of gold, rust, platinum, graphite, diamond, silk, bone, pearl, and lapis lazuli. The potential of these materials, and their connections—sometimes unexpected—to the body and to one another form the roots of these objects.

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Raising Gold at Mills College
October 29, 2021

Raising Gold at Mills College

Late this summer, I was invited to be a guest artist in a Gallery as Laboratory class at Mills College/Slidespace 123 Gallery in Oakland.  The show of my work that we created over the last two months will be up until November 30th and open on the next few weekends, 11-3 pm.  I hope you will go see it if you can. Find the curatorial text the students prepared below:

Maya Kini | Raising Gold

Maya Kini is an artist, poet, and alchemist. She grew up in the Boston area, the daughter of an Italian American mother and South Indian father. Her connection to jewelry and objects began at a young age, stemming in particular from her relationship with her Indian grandmother and the contents of her purse: a combination of mundane items and ornate jewelry. This unexpected mixture sparked an ongoing curiosity in Kini and prompted her to explore the meaning of objects through her work.

Within the works present, Kini makes physical the nine elements of her material alphabet. With roots in the navaratna, a jewelry object consisting of nine gemstones, Kini’s personal language consists of gold, rust, platinum, graphite, diamond, silk, bone, pearl, and lapis lazuli. Taking shape here in unraveling silk cocoons, graphite dust applied to a disc with such care that it becomes luminous, jagged shards of bone, or  a pile of diamond dust, Kini studies the potential of these materials, and their connections—sometimes unexpected—to the body and to one another.  Accompanying each work in this exhibition is a poem or short text inspired by each element, and an abcedarian poem that serves as her artist statement and a cumulative reflection on her work.

Kini’s work—both in language and in three dimensions—explores the concept of, metamorphosis—little resistance as it is, moved from one form to another—as her practice explores the changing value of objects as they are transformed and imbued with meaning through exchange, often outlasting their makers. Concerned with her impact as an artist adding more to the ever-expanding world of things, she often focuses attention on what an object can become after being subjected to a series of physical transformations like burning, melting, and hammering. Kini uses recycled materials in her work, instilling them with new life and new meaning, but with regard for their past histories. In her work, she is drawn to the way things become altered with wear and the mutual influence of the wearer and piece. Kini aims to prompt reflection on the significance of material objects, and the meanings we imbue them with. 

As a maker of objects, I have navigated the waters of sentiment and studied the point when an object becomes a beloved object. This often involves a transaction: a gift, a purchase, the exchange of wedding vows. It involves time. The years spent wearing (or living with) the piece – getting to know it a little more each day. ~ Maya Kini



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Notes on Retreat
September 22, 2021

Notes on Retreat

A simple life.  A series of trails.  A coastline.  A cedar cabin.  Some wooden hooks for clothes.  A shelf.  A cot with woolen blankets.  Windows.  The sounds of the sea at night.  The hum of lobster boats in the earliest morning hours.  A brine that permeates everything, everything wet, threatening to grow moss as thick as what lines the forest floor, if we just give it enough time.

Each morning, I walk on the blue trail over moss cushions and five felled logs – the fourth one rocks a bit, lichen mandalas cover stone slabs.  Each morning, I find new colonies of mushrooms – some are glossy red toadstools, one, a two-tiered pecan pie, another, ghostly white trumpets.  One is shaped like a donut, another spins a fine yarn of spores, a mushroom erupting with silky threads while last week mushrooms stand there in the shadows.  They look charred, as if the wild fire of decomposition has roared through the Maine woods and taken their color and with it their life.  

The blue trail hugs the coastline and peeks at boulders and the brightly colored buoys that mark the evenly spaces lobster traps.  A granite slide marks the best entrance to the swimming cove and just after high tide is the best time to swim.  The cove water is clean and clear of seaweed - warmer later in the day. The moon snails have built their rubbery collars camouflaged in the sand, modernist, ephemeral works.  

When the moon rises, it is tinged pink with western smoke.  One moon for all of us.    

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Cicadas
September 22, 2020

Cicadas

For my 30th birthday, a friend gave me a metal cicada that he had cast in shibuichi, a traditional Japanese alloy of copper and fine silver.  It is impressive as a casting – there is only one feed or sprue into the insect’s body – the molten metal had but one path to travel into the body and then out to the delicate wings.  The legs of the cicada are folded up awkwardly underneath it– as if it was sitting cross-legged before it was forever frozen in metal.   

 
Lost wax casting, the process that was employed to transform the cicada into metal, involves equal parts precision and magic.  It is one of many processes in jewelry that straddles art and industry.  Of the metal resources found on earth, some are mined and enter into a great molten pool that bifurcates into hardware, cookware, a Rodin, the ballast of a ship.  The metal has no designs on what form it will inhabit for months, years, centuries, millennia before it is scrapped, re-alloyed, re-cast, reimagined.  The metal undergoes a physical transformation during the melt and the pour – moving from solid to liquid to solid again.  The cast metal a glowing, cherry red that fades as the metal solidifies and cools.  The animus stabilizes, the magic settles, the object remains.  
 
Lost wax is a literal description of what happens: a form is modeled in wax or built out of other combustible materials such as the cicada (many materials beyond wax are suitable for combustion – leaves, small twigs, plastics, legos, food items, fabrics).  The original material is lost.  The metal casting is its first descendant.  
 
Even the most successful casting bears a mark of process – the place where the molten metal has entered the mold.  These entry points are often skillfully disguised but each casting will have had a wax sprue wire (or several depending on the complexity of the form) added to the model before it is encased in a mixture of plaster and silica called investment.  The liquid investment is poured around the model while it is encased in a steel cylinder.  Once the investment has hardened, the entire mold is heated in a kiln.  The wax melts, burns up, is lost.  The investment cures.  And then the mold is ready for molten metal to be fed into the newly voided interior space. 
 
Many things can go wrong along the way.  Casting as a process is more akin to baking – it requires scales and math and knowledge of what the investment should look and feel like when mixing, a slow ramping up of heat in the kiln and a dropping back down to the perfect temperature for whatever metal one is using, a knowledge of how the metal should look when molten (like mercury) in the crucible, how it moves (pulls into a ball that follows the heat of the torch) at what point it is boiling and therefore too hot…it’s an overwhelming list of variables to keep track of.  Most jewelers outsource their casting to qualified and calibrated casting houses just as most of the public outsources their baguette baking to bakeries with the proper equipment and knowledge. 
 
Because it is a means to reproduce and copy, casting has often been looked down upon as a technique capable of delivering a conceptual punch.  In the case of the cicada, the original object, destined to decompose, is sacrificed for a reproduction that will withstand the ravages of time. The sculptor, Rachel Whiteread whose use of casting draws attention to the spaces we inhabit, has said, “The cast of an object traps it in time, eventually displaying two histories – its own past and the past of the object it replicates.  The perfect expression of this is the death mask.  It captures all the physical accretions of the human face soon after that face has completed its living existence and before rigor mortis accelerates it towards disintegration.  It remains in the world to remind us of the dead as both portrait and memorial.” 
  
Cicadas are long heralded for their grotesque beauty.  Young cicadas are called nymphs and they wait underground for seventeen long years to emerge.  (And, I know you’ll be surprised by this but 2020 is their year).  Cicadas are powerful because of their numbers.  En masse they become a plague.  They reproduce and lay prolific amounts of eggs on trees.  Young trees and vines cannot withstand the burdens of these reproductive efforts and succumb.  
 
The sound of cicadas, recently described by a climate scientist as the sound of heat, is one often attributed to their wings but is actually the sound of the male cicada’s abdomen vibrating in an effort to attract a mate.  The cicadas are completing a cycle, one of the longest in the insect world, and soon the nymphs will emerge from the eggs and drop into the ground for another seventeen years.  
 
Adornment and power have been bedfellows for a long time.  The power of an object to convey meaning, prestige, station, marital status, good fortune is an essential part of the relationship between person and jewel. And so, perhaps an insect totem is in order, a collar of cicadas, the perfect jewel to keep the apocalypse at arm’s length.

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Emerging
June 20, 2020

Emerging

Today is the solstice.  Our family has spent an entire season in quarantine.  Today we begin summer.  Are we emerging from the chrysalis or haphazardly poking small holes in our confinement through which some sun and air seep? 

On this day, I’m remembering backbends - missing them really - as my body no longer moves easily into rainbow form post mastectomy and radiation therapy - the skin no longer supple, full wheel no longer available.  But I can remember how backbends felt in my body - the opening, the aligning, the gathering of energy and strength, the deep breath in, the pause, the exhale out to push up into straight arms, the wide breaths that sustained the pose.  And the coming out.  Wise teachers remind students to conserve energy - to exit poses with grace, without putting holes in the floor, without coming out of alignment and putting unnecessary stress on the joints.  Wise students listen and come out before they fall. Backbends are disorienting and the chest opening that is their nature can be agitating.  They light a big fire in the body.

My yoga practice is something that I tend - like my plants, like my sourdough starter, like my children.  The word tend is a shortening of the verb attend meaning, “to take care of, to pay attention to”.  I pay attention and tend to the fire.  In yoga, the breath is both the bellows and the damper.  The breath is also the thread that connects each movement and without it, the poses are simply shapes.  The breath is the constant and, as any teacher of yoga knows – one must pick up the breath of the class and hold it for thirty, sixty, ninety minutes.  I once asked a teacher of mine how she shifted her practice in response to injury or surgery and she said she showed up and breathed, syncing her breath with the other bodies in the room, tending her own fire while joining it to others. 

Backbends require opening, of the shoulders, of the quadriceps, of the thoracic spine.  My children can drop back into them on a moment’s notice – they are young and flexible and the pose does not need to be built up carefully.  For me, a backbend is built by the poses that precede it.  The deep arch of the backbend, the peak of the very topography it mimics, must be followed by a long and careful walk downhill through the poses that counter the bend.

These last few months have felt like a long-held backbend.  There was no warming up the body and little inkling that one day those with offices and schools would grab their monitors and a packet of worksheets and enter into a seemingly new dimension.  The world became smaller.  For a time, I felt that I had it, that I was strong enough to sustain the pose.  That 2019 - a year of treatment, loss, friendship and milestones, had left me well prepared to dive into the quarantine and find its particular joys:  to write, make objects, cook, garden, send letters, deliver food, make phone calls, and keep my business, my children, my marriage, myself, afloat through it all.

But by the symbolic start of summer, over 100,000 would be dead from Coronavirus, millions had lost their jobs and would begin to lose their houses and apartments, some people would wear masks and some wouldn’t and this would have nothing to do with science and everything to do with political affiliation, that pigs would be shot by their farmers because they had grown too fat to be factory processed, that summer would still call people to rivers, beaches and parks and, George Floyd would die with a knee to his neck, that someone would capture it on video and that any shade of grey Americans thought they were occupying on the topic of racism, would be erased with the words, “I can’t breathe”. 

Breath.  You have it.  You are alive.  Full stop.

Breath has never felt so much like a privilege.  While one has it, breath has many colors and shapes.  There are the first screaming breaths of newborns, there is breath that builds energy, there is breath sucked over a curled tongue that cools the body, there is three-dimensional breath that can help postural alignment by filling compressed spaces with air, there is the breath of even inhales and exhales that calms the mind, there is the athletic breath of free divers and sprinters and of childbirth, there is the easy breath of sleeping children, there is the sustaining, artificial breath of ventilators, there is the rattling breath of the dying.

 My son took his first breaths on Memorial Day in 2014 six years before George Floyd’s last.  He came fast in the grey light of early dawn and, by sunrise, he was with his family.  We ate blueberry pancakes.  My sisters drove up and met their new nephew.  That first night, he screamed in my arms, a ten-pound boy, with red, oxygenating skin and a strawberry splotch above his eye from his trip through my birth canal.  I had a son. 

 That first night (and many others after), I thought, as I did with my daughter six years earlier, “here begins my journey of keeping you alive.” I did not think, “some people will hate you because of the color of your skin.” 

 Which is to say, my children are white while I am brown.  My daughter is browner than her younger brother.  I imagine she will be asked, “where are you from” many more times in her life than my son who is a light shade of gold.  This will be an effort to assign her a place and a label. James Baldwin said in a 1986 about his decision to leave the United States for France, “Before I left this country, I had been afflicted with so many labels that I had become invisible to myself.  I had to go away someplace and get rid of all these labels and find out not what I was but who.”

 At the beginning of this writing, I thought I was caught in the deep backbend of quarantine, with shaking arms, not knowing how to emerge from it, not knowing if my arms still remembered how to bend.  But really, I am in the preparatory stages, reclined on my back, knees bent, feet planted firmly on the floor. 

This is the moment of gathering energy and it requires discomfort.  We have to push up into the bend and trust that we will one day emerge.  We have to find the breath to sustain us in our discomfort and then widen it as we fight.  We can’t return to the work of March with June eyes.  We must tear up the calendar altogether.  And, while engaged in this dismantling, use our breath to sing a mantra of names.

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Mother's Day
May 10, 2020

Mother's Day

Today a package of chocolates arrived

Twelve truffles extravagantly wrapped

in a gold foil box with an ice pack to keep the contents from melting in the early May sunshine.

Before anyone could taste their sweetness

My children, seeing the box

assumed it was a treasure sent from

a grandparent, uncle, friend

They tore it open

marveled at the hand-painted chocolates

And each laid claim.

I wanted to gather them up

children and chocolates

and make them last

preserve them

from the terrible realization

that they are not the centers of the universe

that not every box

that arrives in the post

will be for them to open. 

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Generations
April 27, 2020

Generations

I am from a big family and multi-generational living is not new to us.  For much of the quarantine, there have been nine places and three generations at the table.  It is an abundance of personality.  At a time when many people are experiencing loneliness, I long for solitude – mostly for an uninterrupted stretch in the studio.  I have a very different attention span than my Kindergartener and dividing the day into twenty-minute increments is anathema to me.  I feel like I’m on a never-ending circuit workout.  Parents who have stayed at home with young children know this sensation well.  Days are made out of Google classrooms along with a healthy dose of watercolors, nature walks, gardening, cooking and playing with cousins.  I think they will remember this time fondly. 

 My sister’s house, where we have been sheltering, has a beautiful flower garden.  Each day, new colors pop out – bearded irises from bulbs planted years ago, a hidden stand of yellow freesia, lavender, salvia and an incredible palette of roses. 

We have been making bouquets and pressing flowers –preserving this moment of spring in two dimensions for a future time when the quarantine is over and the busyness returns. 

 In the midst of this stasis, I find great joy in watching the plants and the children grow.  And while I haven’t had much studio time, I have cultivated other practices during this time that feel like they are exercising my creative muscles and reflecting on my work a little more, finding new ways to experience it and send it out into the world.  Here are three generations of hands on a hot spring day – my mom wearing a ring I made for her with five rose cut diamonds for each of her five children, my sister wearing a mokume band that is nearing twenty years of existence and a 22k band set with a small yet flawless and four of our grandmother’s bangles that she never takes off, I am wearing my 20k wedding ring and my niece and daughter have various pieces from the Maya Kini Jewelry collection.  Each of the wedding bands is made from gold coins that my father bought in the 1980’s during a different period of financial instability.  He gave Shamus the Canadian Maple Leaf coin when we got engaged and gave me the coins I used to begin working in gold years ago and made my mom’s band and my sister’s and brother-in-law’s.  The coins are the roots of reimagined heirlooms and important to how I think about material as moving, as forever in the process of becoming…

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