Bracelet c. 1950

This Diné or Navajo bracelet at the Minneapolis Institute of Art is a small piece of metal turned into something resembling a worn landscape. I can imagine the maker, holding this in their hand, feeling the weight, thinking about adornment, the body, and a kind of continuity of pattern. What did it feel like to hammer this? To build up this evenly distributed field of marks? I picture a kind of controlled violence, a focused tapping, slowly building a surface that resembles scales, or maybe a dried river bed. I think about craft, the labor of making. It’s very satisfying to look at something that’s so clearly touched, so clearly the result of a human working with simple tools to transform a material. The artist’s hand is apparent, but so too is the hand of other makers who came before, passing down techniques and designs. You can see a conversation across time, not just about skill but about beauty, about the impulse to make.