Sean Hill

Jewelry came to me very late in life. My background was mostly scholarly. I taught and published most of my life as a PhD professor of Contemporary French Literature in American and foreign Colleges. My main interest as a Professor was to show and explain my students how contemporary thinking affects all areas of human art and expression. I taught Postmodernism versus Modernism, Critical Theories, Literary Trends and Extreme Contemporaneous Writing. Shortly after being tenured in San Francisco, I decided to turn to jewelry making. This came as a shock to anyone involved. I wanted to do something new, something totally foreign to me. Writing had always been a personal agony, being both too personal and too close for comfort. I found out almost by accident that drawing and working with my hands gave me the means to say things, yet without any utterance whatsoever. For a few years, I worked on big sculptural “One of a Kind” hand carved stones bezeled in silver or gold, using together precious stones, shells, fossils, meteorites and art glass combined. I decided later to turn to a less traveled area of jewelry making : resin. Resin has been used for almost centuries but its quality was generally poor and lacked transparency and luster. After years of trial and errors with various brands of new high tech epoxies, I started to create an extensive line of silver and resin jewelry of my own designs. Working with resin is a long and hazardous process that requires a lot of hand polishing and a lot of safety precautions. This explains why none of my pieces are exactly the same and why my production remains always limited. I use a Gem Grade Resin that I have somehow perfected over the years to suit my needs. When the resin with the critical dosage of pigments sets and cures with no bubbles, I grind the excess of resin, polish softly metal and resin together until I get a shiny, transparent and seamless inlay. The finished pieces are again high polished to insure a long lasting brilliant shine to the metal.I would describe my personal style€ as œneo-classical€. I love abstraction and complexity in art but when it comes to designs, I almost immediately gravitate towards a more subdued expression, looking mostly for character, classical beauty and movement. Art pieces in jewelry must remain beautiful adornments that complement and enhance the body, they cannot be full of themselves nor disconnected from their true and vital artistic purposes.