Notes on Process
Meditations on Gold
The following is text from a talk I gave at Arion Press in February 2026. It shares a little bit of the process – aka transformational magic– at work in reimagining an heirloom.
1.
The 13th-century Sufi poet (Mevlâna Jalâluddîn) Rumi (1207-1273) began to whirl and then recite poetry after hearing a goldsmith, possibly his friend Salahuddin, forge metal in the marketplace. The hammer becomes meter or syncopation or a refrain. This was a craft crossover – the goldsmith’s gift to the poet, like a weaver shows a novelist how to add structure and unfold it across the expanse of a textile. Rumi’s goldsmith, seeing him moved, kept hammering. In the end, the gold was too thin to be used for any jewel, having been beaten too much. All that was left were the poems.
Lost Wax Casting
Metal is torch-melted until it is a shining orb that resembles quicksilver. Then it is flung into the mold using centrifugal force.
2.
A goldsmith, or “one who makes articles out of gold,” is a practitioner of an ancient art form and is often commissioned to make objects of immense cultural importance. Many of these objects are housed in museum collections worldwide, providing contemporary goldsmiths, academics, and material historians with information and inspiring further research. Nevertheless, most gold objects throughout history have been melted down and recast.
Gold teeth are recast into a ring.
Still from the movie Schindler’s List. In this cast, the metal is melted in a charcoal block and poured into a ring mold cavity carved in the charcoal.
3.
Gold is conductive, malleable, ductile, impervious to tarnish, and can be easily brought through a physical transformation, from solid to liquid back to solid within a matter of seconds and with a suitably hot fire. This particular quality of gold makes it difficult to trace. The material worked by the contemporary goldsmith might have origins in a mine, a pawn shop, an ancient gold artifact, a coin, or all of the above.
Scrap bin treasures
Mining the scrap bins in New York’s diamond district.
4.
What is gold? An element on the periodic table, un-synthesizable. Although many have tried. The Incas considered it the sweat of the sun. The Aztecs the excrement of the gods. The Hindu god Shiva is fluid gold. Ancient Egyptians thought of gold as the flesh and blood of the gods. Spiritual texts like the Sutras were written in gold or illuminated with gold leaf. Gold signifies enlightenment, transformation, and spiritual wealth. Gold represents over-consumption and greed. It can be flung across buildings to show power and status.
Of course, gold also stands for beauty, light, and redemption.
Gold casting grain
24k gold grain ready to be alloyed, cast, or poured into an ingot to make wire or sheet.
5.
Gold can be drawn down into the thinnest of wires, or hammered between sheets of parchment into foil or gold leaf, and applied to the tops of church domes, mosques, and city halls. Gold has been used as currency and as a safety net during times of great uncertainty. Dentists use gold to make bridges, crowns, and inlays that are “biocompatible”. Gold foil or vark is applied to Indian sweets. Gold ash or bhasmas are used in Ayurvedic medicines. Gold is used in solar panels, aerospace, medical devices, and nanoparticles. Gold is an excellent conductor of electricity, used in computers and artificial intelligence. The World Gold Council says: Gold's superior conductivity ensures that data can be processed and transmitted at high speed with minimal energy loss. Furthermore, gold's resistance to corrosion ensures component longevity and durability – critical for continuous and intensive AI applications”.(World Gold Council, 21 November 2024, “How Important is Gold for AI Demand?”
Gold casting
Freshly cast gold ring with the feeder sprue and button attached.
6.
If I had to draw a chronology of gold, it would be horizontal, like a timeline, and vertical, like a column, and circular like a ring, which is how we humans draw infinity. It would move in all directions, revealing that this top-of-the-food-chain material doesn’t itself care about hierarchies. Irises propagate this way, ginger too; turmeric, bamboo, sorghum. The history of gold is also not based on linearity. Contemporary jeweler Helen Britton says: Gold is a rhizomatic material. Salvaged, stolen, scraped from the earth; melted, refined, mixed and re-worked – and in this process the questions surface: Where did these particles begin? What have they been part of? Histories merge and vanish in the mixture constantly salvaged, melted, mixed, remelted and formed. As goldsmiths, we are always careful to sweep up all the filings that can be construed for future purposes.
Collecting metal “sweeps”
Sending metal dust, sandpaper, filings off to a refiner for credit.
7.
A bit of lore that I absorbed during a goldsmithing workshop in Italy was that in the city of Padua, they filter the water to catch gold. Bench jewelers are routinely vacuumed when they leave their shop, and the vacuum filters, masks they wear, scraps of sandpaper, even carpets, are all put into the “sweeps” buckets and refined. When gold is high, we goldsmiths traffic in dust.
Cover of Salgado’s book, GOLD
Gold miners in the Sierra Pelada, Brazil.
8.
Working with gold means moving between two scales: small and large - the ring, the coin, the dental bridge– are linked with global communication networks and commodities trading. Like mine tailings from the California Gold Rush that connect to rivers that flow into oceans and therefore into filter feeders and fish alike, gold jewelry has a long history before it reaches the consumer. The tail: the long sweep behind the mine, brought about by something so precious, it is sold by the grain.
Shades of gold
Different alloys of gold are engineered for performance, color, economy.
9.
A little bit about measuring: gold is sold in troy ounces. Originating in Roman times as a unit for measuring bronze currency, the troy ounce is now an imperial unit of measure that is used only for precious metal measurements. One troy ounce equals 31.1034768 grams. Pennyweights are another way we measure gold that originated in 15th-century England, where 20 penny coins made up one troy ounce. 1/20 of Troy ounce = 1 pennyweight. In India, gold jewelry is sold by the gram and is 22k or 24k in purity. Karat refers to the percentage of pure gold, or 24k, present in the piece of jewelry. 18k gold has 75% pure gold and 25% other metal – this could be silver, copper, palladium, nickel etc. The goldsmith makes alloys the way a painter mixes paint both for color and performance and cost…gold can be sunshine encapsulated in metal form, pink, rose, peach, red, bright white, warm grey, many shades of yellow: lemon, green, 24k is luminous but often considered too soft, 22k may be just right in some cultures, 18k is the standard for big jewelry houses such as Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels, 14k which is .585 or just over 50% gold and the rest other material, is the choice of Macy’s or Zale’s and 10K, the stuff of class rings, tie clips, cuff links.
Maybe you are hearing things and imagining getting the magnifying glass out and going treasure hunting for your grandmother’s charm bracelet, your mother’s 1970’s cocktail ring that doesn’t fit you and you would never wear anyway, a gold coin given as a prize decades ago when gold was $300 an ounce, you might be surprised to discover how these small gold items can be turned into stacks of cash, or you might be disappointed to learn that what you conceived of as precious is valuable in sentiment but is otherwise, fake.
Today, I could exchange the jewelry I wear on my body for a used pickup truck.
A handful of metal for 1.71 tons of steel.
10.
Golden Almanac:
In May 1977, the month and year I was born, a troy ounce of gold
cost $161.00.
Jimmy Carter was president of the United States.
The interest rate for a 30-year-fixed mortgage was 8.5-9%
A Ford F-100 cost around $4400.
Star Wars premiered.
The second version of an Apple computer was released.
The Western states were experiencing severe drought.
11.
Golden Almanac:
Today, February 19th, 2026, a troy ounce of gold costs $5004
T@#*P is president of the United States.
The interest rate for a 30-year-fixed mortgage is 6.13%
A Ford F-100 costs at least 30,000.
Whole industries are being razed and rebuilt around AI.
ChatGPT 5.2 is released.
The Western States are experiencing severe drought, or they are being inundated.
