Sterling Seal Hunt Ring with Door
Denise Wallace
- Marked Down $1,800.00
- Gallery Price $2,350.00
- Title
- Sterling Seal Hunt Ring with Door
- Artist
- Denise Wallace
- Medium
- Sterling silver, cobalt lapis, fossil ivory
- Troy ounces
- .52 troy ounces
- Size
- Ring size is 5 7/8 approximately, can be sized. Ring face is 7/8" height X 9/16". Shank tapers from 9/16" to 7/16" at center back.
- Signed
- Signed and dated "Denise Wallace"
- Date of creation
- 1990
- Condition
- Excellent
- Description
- As with all of Denise Wallace's pieces, the artwork is clearly an integration of realism and anthropomorphic elements illustrating the interdependant relationship her people and all people have with the natural world.
- Design
- Page 93 of Dubin's book shows two examples of Wallace's seal hunt rings, one with a hinged mask, the other without.
- Provenance
- JMB
- Gram weight
- 15 grams
- About The Sterling Seal Hunt Ring with Door
Sterling ring, hinged mask over carved face. Shank depicts seal hunt.
Sterling silver mill-rolled sheet and drawn wire were used to fabricate the hinged "mask" and settings for the fossil ivory face and lapis. The shank depicts a seal hunt in overlay with dark background created a dramatic silhouette of the characters.
Mask details are accomplished with drill and saw-cut piercings for eyes, nostrils and mouth. Teeth and line work around the eyes are score stamped with a small tool and textured with an electric engraver.
Seal hunt on shank is dramatically rendered in saw-cut overlay sheet soldered, afterward, to the base shank sheet. Oxidizing this base through the cutout areas gives the scene a finishing depth which also enhances the scored motion lines in the water.
Beneath the open mask is a smiling face created by carving a fossil ivory rectangle. Details are carefully incised and inked utilizing an archaic method called scrimshaw. A cobalt lapis is set above face and mask.
- About Denise Wallace
- (Born 1957, Chugach Aleut) In the late 1970's Denise Hottinger attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.In 1999 she and her husband, Samuel Wallace moved to the island of Hawaii. They produced jewelry together prior to Mr. Wallace's death. Their work was the subject of a traveling exhibition, Arctic Transformations: The Jewelry of Denise and Samuel Wallace.Public collections including their work: Anchorage Museum of History and Art; the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City as well as the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, California. Lois Herr Dubin created a substantial hard-bound book for this exhibition (2005).Denise Wallace was awarded Best of Class for her jewelry at the 2021 Indian Market in Santa Fe.
- Cultures
- Medium
- Subject
- Keywords