by Christina Garofalo | published: NOVEMBER 16, 2013
New York’s Forbes Gallery is celebrating imaginative jewelry design with Variations on a Theme: 25 Years of Design from the AJDC, an exhibition featuring 40 new jewelry pieces that runs through February 22. Each one-of-a-kind piece was created by an artist from the American Jewelry Design Council to reflect the theme of one of the council’s annual Design Projects, such as the German jewelry designer Jennifer Rabe Morin’s sterling-silver Ice Chimes Earrings inspired by the cracking of ice ($6,000). The earrings are dotted with diamonds, which Rabe Morin says represent the way ice sparkles, and are strung with sliced aquamarines that chime as the wearer moves.
Two other interpretations of ice are the 18-karat-goldGlacier Ring by the German designer Cornelia Goldsmith, with a nearly 8-carat aquamarine centerpiece and blue and white diamonds ($14,800), and a ring by the California-based designer Mark Patterson that features a slab of dendritic quartz inlaid with painted trees, which he says mimics a pond that has frozen over and trapped leaves and branches beneath its surface ($3,500). On a different theme, some designers created pieces with movement like Barbara Heinrich’s Neckpiece (price upon request), composed of malleable 18-karat-gold wire shaped like leaves that can move from side to side or can be formed around the wearer’s collarbone.