This past December, Gillion Carrara visited her butcher outside Sienna, Italy, and bought some choice cuts. A whole head, in fact, along with knee joints, horns and hooves. “I’ve never tried hooves, but he wanted me to consider them. Maybe I’ll use them to line silver rings, or perhaps to make belt buckles,” she muses.
Carrara, a lifelong Chicagoan, makes jewelry and small home accessories such as candle snuffers, letter openers, drawer pulls and vases from these remains and other organic materials. Of late, that also includes briar root and boxwood she procures in Italy and ebony and maple she buys here. She pairs these substances with silver, gold and bronze to produce streamlined, minimal pieces that are deceptively simple. Closer inspection reveals their exquisite and ingenious craftsmanship, where pieces in horn, bone or wood are lined with precious metals or enhanced with finely wrought, contrasting inlays.
“They make a statement,” says Carrara with uncharacteristic understatement. At 57 and 5 feet 8, she is as bold and interesting as the pieces she produces. Her singular sartorial style starts with the impossibly huge black glasses she sports, and runs to austere, impeccably crafted separates by progressive European designers–all the better “to show off my jewelry,” she notes.
Her working style is equally unusual. “For example, I have to bury the horns in the ground for several months before I can use them, preferably under tomato plants so there are plenty of ants around to eat away all the membranes in their interior,” she explains. She learned this technique from her farming friends in Italy, where she lives three months a year.
Carrara has workrooms here and in Italy, so “I can work and learn more about my craft wherever I am,” she says, explaining that she has “learned her craft from extremely accomplished artisans here and abroad.”
They include the late Ted Drendel, a master silversmith who lived in Chicago; several pipe makers in Italy who work with briar root; and an Indiana biologist who is educating her on the finer points of hooves and horsehair, which is the next element she plans to introduce into her work.
She migrated to jewelry-making 15 years ago. In her first career, she was a shoe designer for Florsheim, a position she took after graduating art school and completing a six-year apprenticeship in an Italian fashion and home furnishings design studio. Florsheim down-sized and eliminated her position in 1983. She has been teaching accessory and footwear design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1977. She was inspired to start making jewelry in 1987 by “the surface patterns I had been working on for so many years. They exploded into three dimensions,” which yielded her first collection of jewelry and home accessories.
Today, she sells her work at Elements in Chicago, Perlie in Winnetka and to private collectors internationally.
