There's an earring on my workbench right now that doesn't have a name, which is unusual for me — usually a piece earns its name somewhere in the first week, sometimes before it's even fully finished, sometimes before I've decided if it's any good. This one has been sitting in a small dish near my loupe for almost three weeks, pleated gold, still on its hook, and every time I pick it up I turn it over in my palm like I'm expecting it to tell me something it hasn't yet.
I can tell you what it's not more easily than what it is. It isn't a redo of anything I've made before, though the fan shape started as a doodle in the margin of a page where I was actually sketching something else entirely — a ring, I think, that never went anywhere. It isn't finished, either. The proportions still feel slightly wrong to me in a way I can't articulate past the bench, and I've reworked the pleats on it more times than I've reworked almost anything else this year. I keep it near the loupe less because I'm actively working on it and more because I don't want to lose the thread of whatever I was chasing when I made it.
I fly out in three days to see a stone-cutter I've worked with for years, on the other side of a very long flight, about a parcel of stones she's been setting aside for me since spring — the kind of trip I never book until I already know, from the way she describes something over email, that it's worth getting on a plane for. My passport's been sitting on my desk since Tuesday, which is its own small ritual: I like having it in view for a few days before a trip like this, the way some people lay out their suitcase early. It isn't packing. It's more like giving myself time to actually want to go, instead of just going.
I don't know yet whether this trip has anything to do with the earring in the dish by my loupe. It might not. But almost every piece I've ever finished had some version of this in its history — a stretch of not-quite-right sitting on the bench at the same time as an unrelated trip, an unrelated conversation, an unrelated stone that turned out, months later, to be exactly the weight the piece needed. I've stopped trying to finish things purely by staying in the studio and pushing harder. Sometimes the studio needs me to leave it for a few days so I can come back and actually see what I've been making.
I'll know the earring's name when I'm back, probably. Or I won't, and it'll sit in the dish a while longer, which is fine too. Some pieces need the waiting more than they need me.
— Arina
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