TECHNIQUES
Two trades
For most of the history of carved stone, the person who cut the gem and the person who set it were two different people. The Romans separated them: gemmarius and aurifex. The division held, with few exceptions, for the next two thousand years — a carver supplies the stone, a goldsmith builds around it.
This studio began on the goldsmith's side of that line. Carved stones of the quality I wanted came from carvers whose prices a one-person workshop could not meet. The choice was to give up carved stones or to learn to cut them. I bought the only instruction I could find, read what I could about the tools, and began on flowers.
What started as arithmetic became the work itself.
There was a second reason, which took longer to admit. A piece I have already seen in my head has to be built exactly that way. Commissioned stones come back close, and close is the wrong answer. Carving my own removed the negotiation.
So the stone and the setting are made by one pair of hands, at one bench, in the order the piece requires. What follows are the methods that make that possible.
Intaglio
An ancient technique, still worked the same way. The image is cut down into the stone and the background is left untouched, so the design sits hollow in the surface — the reverse of a cameo, which stands above its ground.
The Romans wore them by the thousand. Those who could not afford a carved gem wore glass, cast from an impression of one, and a signet was worth naming in a will.
The tool is a diamond point in a rotating handpiece. The Roman one was a wheel turned by a bow, charged with corundum powder. Better bearings, same idea. It cuts one pass at a time, and there is no correction.
The cut is shallow and reads by shadow, so the stone needs light across it at an angle before the image comes up.
Cameo
The reverse. The background is cut away and the image is left standing above it — relief, at the scale of a gemstone.
Layered stone is what made it famous. Sardonyx and banded agate carve from one colour into another, so the figure separates from its ground by itself. Alexandria was doing this by the third century BC, and Rome could not get enough of it: cameos on armour, on cloak pins, collected by the drawer.
In a single stone nothing separates the image but depth. The relief has to be cut deep enough to hold a shadow and not so deep that the stone gives way, and that margin moves with every material.
The cameos here are cut in rock crystal, moonstone, garnet, amethyst — mostly cabochons, mostly botanical.
Carving — three dimensional
The oldest way of working stone and the least forgiving: not a picture on a surface but an object cut from the mass, with a back, sides, and a form that has to hold from every angle.
A stone is not a blank. Quartz has no cleavage and breaks in conchoidal shells, without warning. Moonstone has perfect cleavage in two directions at right angles, and the direction of failure is known before the tool touches it. Opal holds water and fails from heat and drying, not from planes at all. The material decides how it can be approached; the carver only decides where to start.
A petal is a thin wall supported on one side. Most of what goes wrong goes wrong there — a bur caught against the flank rather than the face, and the petal is off. It cannot be put back. The rest of the flower is then cut down to meet what is left.
The finished piece takes light through it and changes with the angle. It is never quite the same object twice in one day.
Relief carving in metal
The same relief, cut in metal instead of stone. A graver is a small steel rod with a hardened point, pushed by hand. Material is taken out until the shape that is wanted is left standing. No machine anywhere in it.
The gravers are made in the studio, because the work sometimes needs a shape that has to be ground for it. Petals are cut by removing everything around them, pass after pass, until they stand clear of the ground.
Metal does not fracture without warning the way stone does. The risk is slower and harder to see coming. One uncontrolled cut ruins everything cut before it.
Grana Milii · Milium
The punch has a cupped tip. Struck once, it raises a dome in the metal, between 0.3 and 0.5 millimetres. Then it is moved and struck again. A shank takes hundreds of them, placed one at a time, following the form of the piece rather than a fixed grid.
They are too small to read as dots. What the eye finds instead is light — broken up, moving, never a single sheet. The carving stands clear of it.
Under the finger, polished silver is hard. This is soft, and slightly warm. The metal is neither.
Under the finger, polished silver is hard. This is soft, and slightly warm. The metal is neither.
The technique is old — beading in the English engraver's term, and the Japanese nanako works on the same principle, in strict rows. What is mine is the millet. It turns up on almost everything I make, so it needed calling something, and Milium is what it got called: a small grain that grows in irregular clusters, humble and pre-industrial. The pieces here are named from the garden and the field. The ground ended up named the same way.
It is the last surface treatment. Nothing is added to the ground after.
