As a seven-year-old girl, I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt.
Looking back, I suspect some of that fascination was inherited from my mother. She had once dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, and although life took her elsewhere, her love of history never disappeared. Somehow, it found its way to me.
I remember my first visit to the Egyptian Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More than anything else, I remember the jewelry.
I came home with a small jewelry-making kit from the museum shop: long blue beads and a tiny shabti figure. I spent hours threading them together, trying to make something that felt as though it belonged to the world I had just seen.
When it was finished, I wore the necklace everywhere.
What I remember most clearly isn't wearing it, but being asked about it. I loved explaining what the little figure was. I loved telling people about Ancient Egypt, and why this strange object hanging around my neck mattered to me.
Without knowing it, I had discovered something that would stay with me for the rest of my life: an object can carry a story. And by wearing it, that story is carried forward.
Then, one day, the necklace broke.
I don't remember exactly how. I remember only the disappointment of losing something that, to anyone else, was probably just a child's necklace.
But perhaps that is the point.
The material value of an object and the value we place on it are rarely the same thing. Objects become important because of where they have been, what they represent, who gave them to us, or who we were when we first held them.
Decades later, I find myself returning to that same instinct in my work.
I am still drawn to objects that seem to hold another time within them: an ancient coin bearing the traces of the hands that made it, a diamond formed over millions of years, a piece of jewelry inherited from someone we loved. I am interested in preserving those histories rather than erasing them, and in giving them a new architecture through which they can continue.
Perhaps The Architecture of Memory began much earlier than I realized.
Perhaps it began with a seven-year-old girl, a handful of blue beads, and a tiny Egyptian figure she couldn't stop talking about.
