Fordite Jewelry Archive

This grouping represents a small body of work I designed and made between 2009 and 2012. I had a lot of fun with this collection. You can’t help but have fun when you add color, swirls, and an intriguing origin story.

A couple of years ago, I was going through an external hard drive I was prepping to retire when I found a folder full of my old work. I’d planned to destroy the drive as part of a data backup/transfer ritual I go through every few years. The ritual involves transferring files to a new device and physically crushing the old one (for the sake of security), assuming that hard drives will fail. The ritual results from a hard drive failure I experienced several years prior, where I lost more than half of my jewelry images and fine art photos.

I lost HOURS of photography work. I’m the type who takes tens to hundreds of pictures per subject that I’m working on, so it was particularly painful. I kept that hard drive in the freezer forever, hoping to recover the data, but to no avail.

Because I had accumulated so many files on my newer backup drive, I’d never really taken the time to sit down and see what was on it. I was pretty happy to discover that all of my Fordite photos weren’t lost. Looking through them, I thought – why keep these buried in some digital vault where no one can see them?

Below is a small sampling of some of my old Fordite designs. I will process and post more images as time allows, so check back often.