Fingerbowl c. 1929 - 1930

This fingerbowl and smaller bowls were made by an anonymous artist using an age-old technique. Look at the tooling, the way the artist has worked the silver. It’s not about perfection but the kind of direct handling that speaks to a longer history of craft. I'm thinking about how the texture of the surface, this kind of hammered feel, changes how the light hits it, adding to the bowls' shimmer. It's not unlike the thick, expressive brushstrokes some painters use, where the paint itself becomes part of the story. If you look closely at the floral design, you can see a pattern repeated, a single motif that is both decorative and somehow structural. The choice to repeat a simple image, gives the bowls a sense of wholeness, a reminder that art, like life, is a series of repetitions, of small gestures that add up to something beautiful. Thinking about other artists who play with these ideas, Eva Hesse comes to mind, with her serial yet organic sculptures, and how they invite a similar kind of quiet contemplation.