Judith Kinghorn

Minneapolis, MN

Judith Kinghorn is an alchemist of the traditional variety; she transmutes objects into gold and precious materials. All manner of botanicals become interpreted, through her magic flasks and crucibles, into glorious and soulful reincarnations of their past selves. Like any artist seeking to capture the essence of things rather than imitate what is already there, Judith magnifies and embellishes the genuine article to somehow appear larger than life.

Kinghorn's jewelry brings the object they emulate into sharper focus, lively and vibrant, a doorway into a secret garden that the wearer is able to share with conscientious observers. Her color palette comes from her personal technique of fusing gold to oxidized silver. Oxidizing silver gives it a black varnish that stands in stark contrast to the warm yellow and orange hues of gold, and she judiciously employs this to good effect in giving dimensionality, delineating stamen, leaf and petal. Gold granules, carefully and ever so delicately soldered, become the pollen for a bouquet of dahlias. In both skillful technique and mindful presentation, Kinghorn excels artfully.

She also sometimes just enjoys a good stone. Moss agate, moldavite, pyrite, druzy agate; Judith finds the most fantastical of semiprecious gems and gives them a suitable frame, like a masterpiece painting of one of Renoir's French girls in the Louvre. The stone itself is so beautiful that all it needs is a little accentuation, and that is Judith's gift of finding just the right degree of ornamentation.

From the botanical to her stone canvases, Kinghorn finds a deep reserve of inspiration in the natural world that she mines for beauty. Her love for flora expresses itself in the diverse species that she translates into wearable form, from the esoteric to the relatively mundane. From poppies and hibiscus to wild carrot, also known affectionately as Queen Anne's Lace, and then throwing in old favorites like chrysanthemums and blackeyed susans, then treading our merry way into fields of star anise and allium (the common family of onions, chives and shallots), Judith reminds us that what we may take for granted is truly a treasure.

www.judithkinghorn.com