Where Light Goes Quiet: The Story Behind Moss & Metal

There's a kind of forest I keep going back to. A place where light goes quiet.

It gets dim before you notice — first dappled, then green-shifted, then nothing but the spaces between leaves. The moss underfoot lets your steps land softer. Somewhere ahead of you, you hear water moving over stone. The air is cool and damp and a little heavy. It smells like soil that hasn't dried in a long time.

That's where Moss & Metal came from.

I grew up in the Kootenays, in southeastern British Columbia, walking forests that look exactly like that. They've stayed with me. These days my walks are often along the North Saskatchewan River, when I visit one of my daughters who lives nearby — and they have that same hushed, damp, deep-green quality I remember from when I was a kid. I take them with my family. We don't talk much. There isn't much to add to a forest that's already saying everything. We come back carrying something that isn't quite an object. A feeling. A colour. The specific quiet that settles into your shoulders when the trees close in above you.

I have been thinking, lately, about how to put that quiet into copper.

The greens that wouldn't leave

When you spend long enough in a damp, mossy forest, your eye stops seeing one green and starts seeing dozens. The bright spongy green of reindeer moss after rain. The deeper, almost-black green of moss in shadow. The pale green of new fern growth pushing up through last year's leaf litter. The colour of the light itself, once it has been through a canopy and come out the other side.

I came home from one of those hikes and started pulling stones out of my drawer to see which ones matched. Jade — deep, soft, slightly cloudy, the colour of moss that has been wet for a while. Quartz — clear, with a green that lives somewhere inside it, the way light lives inside leaves before it reaches the ground. Neither one alone looked like the forest I had walked in. Both, side by side, started to.

That was the spark. Two stones. Two greens. Two ways of holding the same memory.

Two collections that share a feeling

Moss & Metal is really two collections that share a theme. One came out of my forge work, the other out of my wire-wrapping bench. I tried, at first, to make them one. They didn't want to be. So I let them stay distinct, and meet at the theme.

The forge pieces are sheet copper, shaped and then aged with a hand-applied patina, tinted with India ink to draw the green forward. Each one carries a leaf-vine cutout in raw copper laid over the patinated ground — that flash of bright metal against deeper colour, like the moment your eye picks out a single fern stem against the moss behind it. The pendants — Moss Veil and Forest Spine — each hold a small piece of jade. The earrings — Lichen Drops and Fern Drops — are sized like miniature ecosystems for the ear.

The wire-wrapped pieces are a different language for the same thing. Copper wire coiled slowly around a stone, the way a vine actually grows around what it finds. The Vine Drops hold a single deep-green quartz at the bottom of a long twist — heavy enough to swing when you walk, deep enough to catch what light there is. The Mist Drops and Dew Drops are quieter sister pieces, sitting closer to the ear and made for the everyday — when you can't be in the forest but want to wear something that remembers it for you.

I make every piece in this collection myself, in my studio in Derwent, Alberta. The patina takes its time. The wire takes its time. Most of what I do at the bench is wait — for the colour to settle, for the wrap to fall into place, for the piece to look the way the forest looked when I closed my eyes that afternoon and tried to keep it.

Wearing the woods

Most days I don't get to walk along the River, or back through the Kootenays. Most days are ordinary — paperwork, dishes, orders to pack, the dog needing out. That's the work this collection is built for. Bringing a piece of that quiet, dim, green-shifted place into a day that doesn't have any room for it.

A pendant on a chain, a pair of earrings on the ear: small enough to forget about during the day, present enough to remember when you do.

That's where light goes quiet. The forest is a place. The pieces are a way of carrying it.

— Geneen. Derwent, Alberta.