Talking Sticks sculptures, inspired by a Native American custom in which the speaker of a meeting holds a stick and cannot be interrupted, are designed to promote better communications. Close to a yard long, these are made of wood with a variety of metals, glass and bone. Photo: Paul Fournier.
Like the tribal "ornaments" that fascinate her, Enid Kaplan's jewelry is amuletic, designed to protect, heal and enhance as much as it is to adorn. by Mark Lurie

After being lost in the jungle overnight, Kaplan created her Clearing amulet necklace, shown hanging in its own piece of sculpture, to celebrate her deliverance. The necklace is 14K gold, sterling silver, copper, horesehair, aquamarine, and rutilated quartz; the base, of purple heart wood, slate, and metals, with text by N. Lange, is over 2 feet tall. Enid Kaplan recalls being terrified. With night falling, the Montreal jewelry artist and her husband, filmmaker Jordan Deitcher, were lost in the Sumatran jungle in western Indonesia. With little food or water to sustain them and who knows what poisonous creatures lurking about, the couple knew they had no choice: they would have to spend the night out in the elements, enveloped by a thick, moist darkness. “Anytime you're lost in the jungle, your résumé is rather insignificant,” Kaplan deadpans now, though she was fighting back panic at the time. Midway through the next day, they came upon a clearing and made their way to a village. No one spoke any English, but the locals were quick to take care of the lost couple. Kaplan kissed the ground. Later, she would celebrate their delivery by creating several pieces of jewelry, including a rutilated quartz and green tourmaline sculptural amulet called Clearing, symbolizing hope in the face of adversity, or as she puts it, “trusting in the ultimate benevolence of the universe. “I'm a storyteller,” says Kaplan, a studio artist and teacher who is also a popular draw on the lecture circuit. A breezy and articulate speaker who projects an earthy glamour, she leaves audiences transfixed by exotic images and vignettes from her travels among the Masai in East Africa, the Aka in western Thailand, and the Batak of Sumatra, to name a few. Clearing amulet necklace of 14K gold, sterling silver, copper, horesehair, aquamarine, and rutilated quartz, shown by itself. Those who come to hear her also listen attentively as she describes the ways in which such experiences have shaped both her outlook on life and the look of her jewelry. “You don't want to be so self absorbed that no one can relate tot to touch people. I want to communicate. So, while I think really good art starts with your personal journey, it becomes a universal journey. And you're making visible the invisible, which is the same thing that the shamans are doing in all of these cultures.” Creating what she calls “spiritual jewelry” may seem a radical departure for Kaplan, who studied metals and fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design before apprenticing with a master jeweler in Italy. On her return to the United States, she honed her skills doing production work in Manhattan's commercial jewelry district, winning a prestigious De Beers award for a diamond-and-ebony bracelet in the process. Prompted by this success, she began displaying her one-of-a-kind work in gallery shows, making sales, and taking on commission work. Yet she has long had an affinity for tribal art, which she first encountered growing up in New York, exploring its various museums, dreaming of witnessing the creation of this kind of art firsthand. “In my high school yearbook, I wrote, 'I want to be an artist and see the world,'” she says now with a laugh. “I've always studied languages. It's almost like I've been preparing for this kind of a life.” In 1992, during eight months of travelling through Southeast Asia, the couple visited Irian Jaya in New Guinea, home to the Asmat people, because they had been so struck by an exhibit of large Asmat carvings. In Borneo and New Guinea, they ventured truly far off the beaten path: into a lush, volcanic world of headhunters and cannibals. “If you're willing to be a little uncomfortable and work hard to reach the more remote areas, you'll have the most interesting encounters,” she says with rather jaw-dropping understatement, though her own encounters were never that threatening. “In the highlands of New Guinea, we hiked for six days to get to these little villages. Some of the small children were frightened to tears when we arrived, yet curious enough to touch us because they had never seen white people. That was quite an experience.” Kaplan designed her Fertility amulet necklace, about 7” long, of 14K gold, sterling silver, copper, carnelian, moonstone, shell, and gold leaf, when she wanted to become pregnant, which she subsequently did. Photo: Todd Flashner. Initially, they set out to explore native arts and healing traditions. What they found was an approach that didn't distinguish between aesthetics and functionality, and in this case, functionality implied currying favor with the gods. “Everything they do is for spiritual growth, be it a dance or a weapon or a tool. But as a jeweler, I was most interested in what they put on their bodies,” she says. While body ornamentation among these cultures includes headdresses, masks, tattoos, and a plethora of body piercings, she found herself fascinated by their amulets. “An amulet can be worn for many purposes,” Kaplan points out, both against an evil or for a good. “Protection against the evil eye, maybe to open you up for love, to protect you from negativity or evil spirits, to strengthen you as a warrior.” Sometimes, an amulet can help “convert” a threatening force into a helping one. “Very often,” she explains, “there will be portions of an animal you've killed. Among the cannibals, you take parts of the creature that you've conquered and then you absorb its strength. “In Thailand, they have big markets for amulets. Often they're made out of cast ceramics, and they become powerful only because they're blessed by a certain monk,” she says. In the tribal cultures, everything from bracelets to neckpieces to ceremonial knives called krisses have amuletic functions. And while amulets are everywhere in animistic cultures -- whose people believe in an active spirit world underlying the merely visible -- amulets are far from uncommon in the monotheistic West. Moon Birth, an amulet necklace of 14K gold, sterling silver, carnelian, and moonstone, is meant to enhance independence and self-expression; pendant is about 6” long. “You can find a herdsman in northern Africa who's wearing pouches on his head that have elements of the Koran in them,” she says, adding that crucifixes and mezuzahs play a similar role for Christians and Jews, respectively. “It's just to keep goodness in your life. It's a way to feel you have some control over the forces of the world.” Since returning to North America, she has made a series of amulets, starting with a piece designed to help her become pregnant. Entitled Fertility, virtually everything about the piece was symbolic. The vessel not only conjured associations with the womb, but was made of copper, with its associations to the flow of blood and conducting of energy. Within the vessel, she included several personally significant items, including rice from her wedding. On the piece's surface, she used shells to symbolize fertility, while carnelian was chosen “for vitalizing the physical, emotional, and mental bodies.” Shortly after making the piece, she became pregnant with her son, Aden. Asked if she believes the amulet played a role, she reflects for a moment. “I'm not going to say that if I didn't wear it, I wouldn't have gotten pregnant,” she says. “I think it was more like an articulation to create a space to allow that to come in. It's a question of where you're going to focus your energy. I wanted to have a child, and I wanted it to come easily, so then I made something to evoke that. It's like an invocation to the universe. 'I'm ready for this; bring it to me.' “Do I believe that? Sure. I think we do create our own reality. Not that we literally move things around, but I think we attract energies to us.” Visiting her studio in a former garment factory in Montreal's now artsy Plateau district, one might easily get the impression that each piece of jewelry requires special ingredients to attract these energies. Her stones, for example, veer decidedly toward the esoteric. Earrings of 14K gold, sterling silver, azurite/malachite, sea tusk, and green onyx, titled Elemental Alchemy. Photo: Todd Flashner. “I've always loved stones. When I was four or five years old, we'd go to the [American] Museum of Natural History in New York, and we couldn't leave until we saw the gems and minerals, so there was a connection very early on. But now, because of the amulets, I've done a lot of research on the historical associations and the cultural significance. If it's a choice between one or two stones, sometimes that will make the difference.” Favorite stones include tourmalinated quartz and lapis lazuli; lapis, she tells us, is associated with enhancing clairvoyance. She also has a special fondness for carnelian, whose bright red is said to represent vitality, making it an earthy counterpart to the more heavenly moonstone, another favorite. For all that, however, Kaplan takes the view that any meaning attributed to a stone is “purely arbitrary. I don't think you could get scientific” about these associations. “It's more connected to the subtle images that a culture or an individual makes.” Stones are just one element among many in Kaplan's repertoire. Throughout her studio are tables, shelves, and boxes filled with stones, teeth, shards of metal, old computer circuit boards . . . she finds meaning and aesthetic potential in tree branches, taxidermy eyes -- even old photographs, which she imprints onto wood. While embracing the term multimedia artist, she notes that she's simply following the pattern of most tribal cultures. “Tribal artists have always worked in and around different materials: wood, shells, bones, paintings, feathers -- everything. People like Picasso and Braque finally began to introduce found objects into their art, and of course I loved that kind of stuff. But in tribal cultures, not just the ones we visited but everything I was seeing in museums from Africa, South America, and Asia, that's all that it is. They don't call themselves mixed media artists; it's what they do. It's natural to synthesize things.” One of Kaplan's favorite materials for adding color to her work is niobium, a soft, gray metal that can be patterned with color by charges of electrical current. “Niobium has somewhat of a bad name, because many people have tended to stay with the novelty of the rainbow effect rather than really explore its possibilities. It can be really garish, but it can also be quite subtle,” she says. Butterfly Dreams brooch, 3 3/4” x 3” x 1”, symbolizes the ephemeral nature of beauty; made of 14K gold, sterling silver, copper, niobium, garnet, and ruby. Photo: Paul Fournier. Kaplan used niobium to accentuate one of her most striking and popular pieces, a brooch entitled Butterfly Dream. The piece depicts a woman --- who bears an undeniable resemblance to Kaplan -- surrounded by encircling wires that represent a spiritual force field, with butterflies floating around her head. “I think butterflies are the universe's pastel sketches -- they're so ephemeral. The whole idea that the universe is giving us this incredible beauty that's iridescent -- that's not to be believed because it's so magnificent -- for such a fleeting moment: I think it's a reminder that change is constant, and not to hang on to things. Even things of beauty will be destroyed, and then from death comes new life. . . . The butterfly is a reminder to let all things pass, and we get in trouble when we try to hang on to anything. We kill it.” After a short walk from her studio, I find myself sitting across from Kaplan in her living room, dazzled by the tribal artwork covering her walls. Just back from their trip to Southeast Asia, she and Deitcher have brought back a miniature museum's worth of pieces ranging from ceremonial masks and knives to finely carved hunting traps. The works are beautiful, but also a little unsettling. Hanging from the main wall is a large red woven blanket known as a pua, depicting row upon row of tribespeople and spirits engaged in some sort of warrior dance. Kaplan informs me that the puas are woven by the Iban women of Borneo, and have traditionally served the purpose of receiving severed heads. “Ouch,” I mutter, reflexively rubbing the back of my neck. As Kaplan explains, for cultures such as the Iban and Asmat, there is no such thing as a death from natural causes. Even when someone does die from old age, disease, or by accident, the tribe of the deceased will seek retribution by killing a member of another tribe. At times, outsiders, such as missionaries and anthropologists living among these tribes, have found themselves fatally caught in this never-ending cycle of vengeance. During a 1992 trip to New Guinea, Enid Kaplan became fascinated with the amulets worn by the local people. Kaplan frequently sketches her amuletic designs in some detail, making notes about what materials she intends to use. “Because it was so dramatically barbaric there, as well as the fact that you could only get there by plane and small boat, it's one of the few parts of the world that has remained untouched by the 20th century,” says Kaplan, who adds she's careful not to romanticize these cultures. It's clear, though, that she is fascinated by them -- and by their “ferocious” art. “We began to wonder why we're so strongly attracted to the art from these cannibals and headhunters. There's something in their images that is extremely powerful and vibrant, and this seems to make for some of the best art I've seen anywhere.” And what about the artists themselves? “They would never call them artists,” Kaplan says. click here for a larger view of this sketch. “They call them healers or shamans. They're the people who are capable with their hands to manifest these spirits into something concrete. In a sense, they're performing a very important mission for their people. The person who weaves a pua has to be very spiritually evolved, because if they're not, they're going to improperly release spirits that could wreak havoc in the village. The artist really has a powerful role -- and it's not something to be taken lightly.” Back in North America, where individualism reigns supreme over, well, tribalism, Kaplan finds herself in a similar role when commissioned to create a particular amulet for someone. “What do you want to let go of in your life, what do you want to enhance, and what do you wish you had that you don't have?” she asks those who commission her. “The concept is to make you better, to help you reach your potential, to be who you want to be.” Next, she says, she'll start pulling out materials to see what a person is drawn to -- colors, stones, bones -- and then she'll make suggestions. “It's like I'm a medicine woman,” she continues, “in the sense that I'm putting these elements together with a healing intention. I often think that what makes a piece of artwork powerful is the intention of the artist, which is why when you see tribal art -- or for that matter contemporary art -- that is made entirely for commercial purposes, it seems to lack soul.” Enid Kaplan Not that making money isn't important for Kaplan, who recently started selling her work at trade shows. As if to prove her right, though, it's the pieces designed with no commercial aim in mind that seem to be her most popular. “Certain pieces I have to keep for myself -- and then, of course, those are the ones that people want. It's as if the piece vibrates at a certain frequency. It's almost like they feel it, and they know that that is an important piece.” Enid Kaplan can be contacted through the Miller Gallery, New York, NY, at (212) 226-0703. 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