c. 1971
This pendant is stored off-site. To arrange a viewing, please contact the gallery directly.
This is a 22kt gold repoussé work by Bill Reid that was made ca. 1971, called Hawk Moon. The pendant is representative of a stage in Reid’s career when he had switched almost exclusively to gold in his jewelry making. It was also around this time that Reid was making some of his most creative and detailed pieces by hand. In 1968 he received a Canada Council grant and moved to London to work on his goldsmithing techniques. From London he moved to Montreal for three years. It was here that he developed and made some of his more famous pieces, including the miniature boxwood maquette which would become the model to one of his best known sculptures “Raven and the First Men” (at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver). Hawk Moon was carved around this period. Shortly after his return to Vancouver Reid was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. As his health started to affect his muscle control, more of his pieces would come to be partly executed by apprentices and colleagues-though Reid always oversaw the design and work. In keeping with Reid’s penchant for making multiple variations of his designs, a similar piece to the one below was cataloged in Doris Shadbolt’s book “Bill Reid”.
"...Certainly the sure knowledge that men of all places and times are much more alike than they're unalike, that ideas like aesthetics, art, excellence, beauty are not the exclusive property of those who happen to have invented words to describe them. Also I think that once we discard our ethnocentric, hierarchical ideas of how the world works, we will find that one basic quality unites all the works of mankind that speak to us in human, recognizable voices across the barriers of time, culture and space: the simple quality of being well made" Bill Reid, 1992—from Bill Reid: All the Gallant Beasts and Monsters
