n shelves and tabletops in Sydney Lynch's Lincoln, Nebraska home, water-smoothed stones and bleached shells lie in carefully considered arrangements: temporary mosaics that span both space and time. Collected over the years since early childhood, the objects are bits of nature made personally relevant through a practice of selecting, preserving and organizing. Figuratively, this practice could be considered equivalent to the process of committing images to memory and later drawing new meaning from them by reviving them in different sequences and configurations. Each stone or shell, picked up in a specific moment of mysterious attraction, serves as tangible evidence of past experience. The arrangement of these souvenirs into harmonious compositions in the present is a reminder that experience preserved in memory is not an inert residue but rather a dynamic, even living, element. As metaphors for the active contents of memory, Lynch's collections of stones and shells give clear insight into a method of jewelry design that involves nature, recollection of the past, and novel redistribution of form.

Best known for her compositions of vibrant, irregular stones set in gold grids or concentric circles that seem to sway and throb asymmetrically to a primitive beat, Lynch has over the past year developed a new facet of her art—or, perhaps more accurately, has revisited an aesthetic only explored in her earliest work. Relying for much of their visual appeal on a soft contrast of oxidized sterling silver and eighteen karat gold, the new brooches, pendants and earrings are tonally and coloristically subtler. Their quieter evocations of energy suggest contemplative states of mind rooted in simple observation of natural forms. While the works of Lynch's other more colorful series give the impression of conscious orchestration— a syncopation deriving from careful attention to rhythm and balance (and then a strategic violation of these)—her new "black and gold" jewelry seems to have evolved on a more deeply and purely intuitive level. In her previous works the rigidity of the grid, or sometimes merely the square, is deliberately distorted into a seemingly elastic state through implicit return to natural influences. In the new jewelry, however, geometry never really enters the picture, but nature seems present from the start.

This is not to say that the new black and gold earrings, brooches and pendants accurately depict natural objects. Except in rare instances, no particular species of plant is represented through the mostly botanical allusions. Lynch is quick to assertthat even when her titles refer, for example, to the hibiscus or cattail the actual forms are abstractions: only general references to things that she has observed, not attempts to faithfully replicate any particular aspect of those things. The vagueness of these references is ultimately significant to the overall aesthetic of the series, which derives as much from the arrangement of forms as from the characteristics inherent in those forms themselves. If nature seems immanent in the work this is because Lynch has combined certain lines or contours appropriate to organic objects with a disposition of elements that suggests balance between randomness and order. The effect is of nature essentialized: a view of nature that seems to pass through the simplifying and ordering medium of memory rather than to derive directly from observation in the present.

Like the individual parts of her jewelry, Lynch's manner of grouping objects appears at first glance to recall nature, yet in slightly simplified terms. The arrangements seem effortless, their generation essentially a matter of referring to precedents in the actual landscape. On closer inspection, however, what appear as natural dispersions of branchlike elements, blades of grass, or stalks of plants are discovered to be carefully controlled products of design. There is no actual accident, no casual or fortuitous falling of forms together but rather the imposition of a strategy of composition that is subtle enough and sufficiently restrained to appear almost as if it were the guiding principle of nature itself. Recognizing this unobtrusive

Previous Page: BIRD NEST PIN of oxidized sterling silver, eighteen and twenty-two karat gold, pearl; fabricated, 5.0 centimeters diameter, 2005. TIDAL SERIES, pins and earrings of oxidized sterling silver, eighteen karat gold, tourmaline beads, sterling cable; fabricated, pins 6.3 centimeters diameter, 2005.
Above: DRIFTWOOD NECKLACE of oxidized sterling silver, pearls; fabricated, 40.6 centimeters long, 2006. Photographs by Alan Jackson.