The significance of jewelry with my background as an Indian-American

I did not come to jewelry through design. I came to it by growing up around it.

My childhood summers were spent at my grandmother’s house in India. My mother and my aunts wear some form of jewelry on a daily basis, and always have. Not brought out for occasions. Worn.

And behind every piece there was a memory. Something had been happening when it was bought, or given, or handed down. When they talked about a piece they loved, they were rarely talking about the gold. They were talking about the story that had made it theirs.

That is the part I kept, long before I had any thought of making something myself.

How I designed it

I wanted these pieces to work the same way.

Every piece comes from something real. An instrument I have used for years. A part of the body I have spent a career working with. But I have deliberately not told anyone what any of it is supposed to mean to them.

Someone will wear a scalpel because they are a surgeon. Someone else will wear the same piece because of what a surgeon once did for them, on a day they have never spoken about since. Someone will wear it because they like the line of it and have no story at all, which needs no defending.

The piece is the same in all three cases. What it holds is not, and that is the point.

The Ammama

If one piece holds both halves of where I come from, it is this one.

The serpent is the oldest sign we have for medicine, older by far than any instrument I pick up in an operating room. The black beads are special to me because they are rooted in my Indian heritage. The Ammama puts the two on a single chain. Two serpents in gold, with emerald eyes, hanging from a strand of black beads.

That is the whole of it. Where I am from and what I do, on one chain.

The texture on the snakes’ skin took several attempts. We tried it across different materials and compared the results before settling on the one that read best in gold. The beads are my own version of a chain I have known my entire life, which is also why the piece can be ordered on a plain gold chain instead, for anyone who would rather wear it that way.

What I hope for them

I think often about the way the women in my family talk about their jewelry. Decades on, they still remember who gave them what, and when, and why.

That is what I would like for these pieces. Not that they are admired, although I hope they are. That somebody wears one long enough for it to collect something, and that years from now the story is the part they tell, and not the gold.

Dr. Rukmini (Vinaya) Rednam
Houston