| Conference Report, Italy Rocks! | |
2010/01/24 14:44 I’m finally recovered from my trip to the APTPI Conference in Milan last week. The conference was a wonderful gathering of people from all around the world, taking courses on a wide range of topics on body modification and tattoo. It was cold as hell, and we mostly stayed in the hotel for the three days of conference. Italy for me is all about, pizza, espresso, and pasta, and I was not disappointed by the local family style restaurant that was our nightly escape from the hotel. The highlight was seeing all my good friends, from everywhere…not just Italy, also Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, and the USA. The conference was well organized and many thanks to the Italian hosts! Next time I hope to have a chance to stay longer and explore Italy some more.
   
   
   
   
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2010/01/11 11:08 
I will be at the APTPI conference in Milan, Italy from January 15th to the 17th representing Gorilla Glass. |
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2010/01/08 12:53 I recently had the great good luck to see an amazing private collection of rare Mesoamerican ear plugs and eyelets. My friend Christopher is working as part of a team restoring a massive collection of 40,000 ancient Mexican artifacts in Oaxaca. The collection originally belonged to an ex-pat living in Mitla. The collection is diverse, with pieces collected from all over Mexico, and it is the job of these archeologists to clean, repair, authenticate, and document each piece in the collection. I feel really lucky…it is a rare opportunity to see these amazing, unique and finely crafted pieces.
In the first photo there is a clay figure representing Cocijo, the Zapotec god of rain and lightning. He is wearing a massive head dress, large ear expansions, and has an elephant like snout. In the foreground there are two eyelets in a floral design, one made in jade and the other in obsidian. The tip of each petal has a tiny perforation. Perhaps feathers or beads hung from the ends. The obsidian piece is interesting because of the length of the tunnel. In the second photo you can observe the wonderful transparency of the gray obsidian volcanic glass.
In the third photo there are two obsidian labrets and several obsidian “corazones” or hearts. The hearts are the left over from the manufacturing process of knocking off long shards from a central core of obsidian. One of the labrets has a hole in the center, perhaps for hanging beads or for an inlay.
The next photo has a couple of pieces of jade Mayan style earrings. I believe these are jadeite, nephrite, or possibly diorite but I am not a stone expert. These are extremely interesting because they demonstrate how some ear expansors were designed in multiple parts to be fit together. The lighter jade is the back side, and the darker jade would fit into the groove. This explains how the wearing surface could be so small on many of the Mayan style flares, because they would have had a second back plate to keep them from falling out. The hole in the back side would probably have had a string with a counter weight passing to the front. These are most likely not a pair originally, but they are the proper scale to show how these pieces were designed. In the sculpture of Cocijo the ear jewelry looks similar to this style. Could these be Oaxaca pieces with a Mayan influence?
The following photo is of a pair of copper ear tunnels. These are possibly from Central Mexico and are later pieces, right before the Spanish invasion, when metal working began to be more common. There were groups in central Mexico who began to manufacture metal weapons and who most likely would have displaced the Aztecs if the Spanish invasion had not arrived first.
The last photo is an obsidian earspool in a classic Teotihuacan design, which was also used by the Mixtecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations. The manufacture and thinness of these pieces are astounding and remain a mystery how they were made. I work with obsidian all the time, but I couldn’t imagine making a piece like this. And they didn’t have grinding wheels! Wow!
   
   
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2009/12/26 21:59 Christmas in Mexico is no joke. You don’t see much of Santa Claus nor Rudolf, but there is a ton of fireworks and two weeks of block parties in every pueblo. Basically a two week continuous party with the whole family. Expect to eat and drink a lot.
We had the year end Gorilla Glass party last week before vacations started, which consisted of a barbecue, gift exchange, and piñata. The piñata was a new sort that I had never seen before, with little strings to pull underneath so that you don’t need to wack it with a stick. This seemed way too easy and against the whole piñata concept, so we smashed it with a stick anyway. Abigail gave me a little painted armadillo, and I gave Yolanda a glass dragon fly that I made.
I am constantly reminded of what a great crew of people I have working with me. A good part of my team has been with me for years and we have struggled through all sorts of life hardships and joy together- funerals, births, sickness, weddings, and the day to day work making glass. We come from all sorts of backgrounds- me the tattooed gringo from New England, Margaret from Seattle, but mostly local women from small towns in the hills, many are single mothers.
In Oaxaca there is a big exodus of men to the bigger cities or to the United States to look for better paying work. In Oaxaca tourism powers the economy, and between the social unrest of 2006, the bad economy worldwide, and the swine flu virus, tourism in Mexico is in the dumps leaving many small towns in desperate poverty. I feel extremely lucky to be able to provide good work for my team during these hard times. Not only do I provide work I am also able to provide free health care for all my employees and their families, free daycare, paid maternity leave, free continuing education opportunities, up to two weeks paid vacation, and a year of the end bonus equivalent to two weeks salary.
In reality Gorilla Glass exists thanks to my customers; it is the amazing community of customers and friends from around the world who demand glass piercing jewelry who make Gorilla Glass possible. The piercing community is one of the greatest groups of sweet, eccentric, passionate, occasionally jaded, diverse, and intelligent people I know. Thanks to all of you! It is with great satisfaction and pride that I can be the link between my community working and living here in Mexico and the big international community of piercing shops around the planet.
   
   
   
   
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