Profile: The Drama in the Details
“With my work, either you get it or it just doesn’t speak to you at all,” says jewelry designer Ann Lightfoot.
Her stones aren’t flawless gems. Their appeal lies in the imperfections—the color gradations and the attendant blemishes, nicks, and dents—that reflect the designer’s own earthy, easygoing spirit. “A lot of places might say, ‘There’s a flaw in that stone,’” says Lightfoot, who lives and works in Connecticut. “I wouldn’t use something that has a crack, but I like those imperfections.”
Lightfoot’s taste isn’t indiscriminate. She rigorously seeks stones—typically obsidian, malachite, and emerald—with a certain je ne sais quoi. “Say you’re working with emerald—you have the pure emerald crystal in the middle which, to me, is not the most interesting part of the stone,” she says. “There’s only so much you can do with that, and all that jewelry looks the same. I’m more interested in the pieces that have other materials involved, so the emerald is a little bit green but has some other inclusions, whether it moves into a feldspar or a granite. It’s not that pure crystal; it has a lot of character to it.”
The resulting designs feel as if they’ve been pulled straight from the earth, gracefully bound with delicate cord or suede (Lightfoot doesn’t use gold, mostly because of the ethics behind mining). She’s constantly working to achieve a visual balance with her materials. She offers a a brilliant green aventurine design as an example. “That color is so vibrant—naturally so—that I couldn’t pass it up,” she says. “But I’m not a bright color person, so I settled it down a bit with the brown suede.” The piece—a rugged, fringed necklace—feels like a perfect encapsulation of both the designer and her designs: sufficiently dramatic, in an unassuming way, to carry the day. “It’s nice—I don’t really have to buy many clothes anymore,” she says. “I just put on a piece, head out, and that’s that.”
Photographed at her workshop in Connecticut by Nicole Franzen
