Somewhere between the flamingo exhibit at a zoo in Barcelona and a market in Marrakech where a vendor had arranged bolts of coral silk in the afternoon sun, the understanding arrived that certain colors are meant to grab you by the throat. They register before conscious thought catches up, before the brain has finished forming the sentence that begins with "Wow." Carnelian and coral together operate unfairly. They are insistent because their particular frequency of sizzle is one that human eyes need time to adjust to.
When I created this color mood board, there was a strong sensory connection between a coral Bakelite telephone from the 1950s to a red bicycle propped against a whitewashed wall, to buttons arranged by tone in a glass jar, to embroidery thread selected from among hundreds of nearly identical shades, to the specific way ice crystals were colored to refract a winter afternoon sun into warmth. What they share is not a category but a color feeling. More precisely, a quality of warmth that sits at the end of the cul-du-sac of orange and red and pink without giving any of them the upper hand.
Carnelian has been generating that conversation for thousands of years. Long before it became a gemstone I used frequently in my studio in Philadelphia, it moved through the ancient world as a stone of consequence — worn by Egyptian royalty, carried by warriors, pressed into the wax seals of documents that changed the course of civilizations. What those cultures understood intuitively was what gemologists understand technically: carnelian holds light differently than almost any other stone. The warmth doesn't sit on the surface. It lives in the interior of the stone and radiates outward, which is why a carnelian necklace in a room feels different from a carnelian necklace in a photograph. The energy it gives off is three dimensional in a way that only a natural gemstone can.
Coral arrives at this story from the ocean's patient work over millions of years. Where carnelian burns from the inside, coral glows. That peachy warmth, moving between the softest blush and the most saturated terracotta depending on the light and the hour, is the color of bougainvillea on a white wall in late afternoon, of the sky at the precise moment before a Mediterranean sunset decides to deepen into evening. Coral doesn't compete with carnelian. The two exist in the same color world the way a first and second movement of a symphony exist together — distinct in character, inseparable in the larger story they're telling.
The mood that carnelian and coral create together is specific. Not boldness in the performance sense, but the kind of color choice that doesn’t need an introduction. The women throughout history who reached for this color world consistently in their textiles, their ceramics, their jewelry, their fashion shared a quality that had nothing to do with extroversion. They had simply arrived at a place of comfort with their own presence.
Every creation in the Coral and Fiery Red Color Series was chosen from that understanding, not for how the stones looked in a photograph or against a white background in a well-lit studio, but for the specific quality of their bold warmth when held, when worn, when they catch the light in a room and shift something in the air. What becomes possible as you move through a room, begin a conversation, welcome a new day, when the warmth at your wrist or your throat is already talking before you have uttered a word?