by Bella Erakko
With an American mother and Spanish father, Raquel Pardo learned early in life how many ways her first name could be mispronounced. She quickly resolved the dilemma, liking Rocky. Once she became a jeweler, the name fit even better. “After all,” she laughs, “Gems are rocks.” As Alliance Art Gallery’s featured October artist, Rocky launched her passion for jewelry in 2006 when taking a metal smithing class at Craft Alliance in St. Louis. Though required by her scholarship to take a class in every medium, she admitted, “It was over for me when I took metal smithing. I fell in love with the medium. Pottery is fragile. It breaks. Slumps. You can always hammer out metal.” Though she has recently been on an earrings binge, designing mismatched pairs that offer satisfying air- or hair-swept tinkles, her passion is rings … kinetic rings … rings that sparkle and make sounds. She admits, “I am a very gestural person. I love having jewelry that when you move, it catches the light and sparkles but also makes sound. All of your senses are engaged.”
“I mix my own gold-and-silver alloys,” she explains. “It allows different textures, different properties for fusing gold dust on silver.” Pushing the pocket, Rocky has worked for years to find a way to work with rose dust gold, complicated because of oxidation issues. Tantalizingly, three times she has succeeded.
With about 20 shows a year, her studio captures a lot of her time. “I have worked in the corner of my dorm room, even my kitchen. Today I have a 16’x30’ studio and it already feels packed to the gills. I’m like a plant. Give me a 2-story building and I’ll fill it.” Where did all this creative talent come from? Rocky remembers her childhood: “I spent summers in Spain. “I couldn’t go to the beach until I had done my aunt’s ‘homework’—giant art books for me to study. My great aunt was a relatively well known artist and my uncle a famous singer.”
When Rocky began traveling for shows, now 20 a year, she enthused, “I thought it’d be like little vacations.” But she’s slowly transitioning to fewer shows with a studio one-on-one appointment emphasis. In that intimate connection between designer and wearer, a kinesthetic flow of sound and beauty, she believes, can emerge.
An opening reception will be held on Saturday October 8 from 4 until 7:00 with an artist's talk at 6:00. This event is free and open to the public.
