September 2026
Constellations
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact
Throughout human history, the night sky has been a source of inspiration for myths, story telling, and orienting oneself within the universe. Ancient cultures around the globe came to ascribe meaning to familiar clusters of stars, known as constellations, and named them after the beings and objects they resembled. Their astral motifs have come to adorn textiles, illustrations, ceramics, and are the focal point in my collection of constellation jewelry.
Albrecht Dürer, The Celestial Map - Northern Hemisphere, Woodcut, Germany, 1515
Popular culture has never seen as much mass appeal for the zodiac as the craze it is today. Everyone knows their star sign, its associated personality traits, and even the glyph that symbolizes it, but how many can identify their sign’s constellation? In my work, I set stones to resemble the pattern of a constellation, shrinking a celestial phenomenon to a scale that can be worn and appreciated daily.
The International Astronomical Union has approved of 88 constellations used to map out regions of the sky in astronomy. While the zodiac may be one of the more familiar types of constellations today, they represent a small fraction of the clusters that are still recognized to this day. The constellation Orion as dictated by western astronomy is one of the most easily identifiable and familiar groups of stars, having been attributed to the image of a hunter by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Even so, Hindu, Egyptian, and Navajo cultures all had respective interpretations of the same cluster of stars, representing different mythological figures and meanings.
`Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, Kitab suwar al-kawakib al-thabita (Book of the Images of the Fixed Stars), Ink and Gold on Paper, 15th ct, Iran
Drawings of the Zodiac, Pen and Ink, Netherlands, 16th ct
Throughout history, the stars have been referenced in mapping and navigation, as well as defining the passage of time by representing different seasons in agriculture. For example, the North Star is the brightest star at the top of the constellation Polaris generally aligns with Earth’s rotational axis appearing as a fixed northern point by which mariners could navigate. I’ve encapsulated its essence in my work like a talisman for direction.
If you would like a piece of jewelry to represent your star sign or other cosmic motif, we would love to collaborate on something stellar.