T Magazine: Small World

William AbranowiczIn the dining room of Gabriella Kiss’s studio, her own jewelry designs are arranged with objects that she has collected over the years. See the interactive slideshow

Some workplaces are all business, with nothing but the tools of the trade to reveal their owner’s identity. But the studio of the jewelry designer Gabriella Kiss is, by comparison, an autobiography in three dimensions. For starters, the small 19th-century white clapboard house doesn’t look like a workplace. Located across the road from the converted 1820 church in Bangall, N.Y., that she shares with her husband, the furniture designer Chris Lehrecke, and their two sons, it contains a nitty-gritty studio (the former garage, which connects to the house by a new breezeway) and a parlor-like showroom furnished with things like a taxidermied miniature African antelope and Belgian chandeliers that Kiss and Lehrecke bought on their 20th anniversary. There is also a dining room, with a modern table by Kiss and a desk by Lehrecke, that is lined with still-life arrangements of works — by Kiss, her friends or her son August — and objects that inspire her work, like 19th-century Parian ware hands, an Indian miniature painting and a swan’s wing. And there’s a working kitchen with arched windows and shelves full of colorful transferware cups and bowls — Kiss is an inveterate flea-market shopper. She and her assistants often cook lunch here, using whatever local ingredients happen to be in season. Upstairs, two bedrooms are reserved for assistants who live out of town and need a place to stay when they’re working. When you visit Kiss’s studio, you get the feeling that you’re really seeing her outlook on life.

Kiss, who studied sculpture at Pratt Institute and worked for the jewelry designer Ted Muehling before going out on her own in 1988, is known for understated jewelry that highlights the beauty of semiprecious stones, as well as bolder pieces like earrings in the shape of snakes or clipper ships. She also sees beauty where others may not. Some of us look at mouse bones and shudder, but to Kiss, such things are “the substructure of form and movement. I’m inspired by them.” Casting mouse femurs and hip joints is no easy task — “They’re so tiny, so exquisite,” she explains — but Kiss transforms them into delicate gold and diamond chains. “It’s like honoring the life of the mouse,” she adds. “It’s a nice epilogue.” Likewise, the mushrooms that grow at the base of a dead tree might not top everyone’s list of desirables, but the bronze and silver brooches and earrings that Kiss casts from them certainly might. “We might as well celebrate our decay,” she says cheerfully.

Kiss’s dry but whimsical sense of humor extends to the work she’s given by friends and fellow designers and artists in exchange for her jewelry — like the three Roz Chast cartoons in the breezeway, the drawing of a deer by Kiki Smith, or the flies, made of pencil erasers and wire by Lee Hale, that sit beneath it on a narrow shelf in the dining room. In the bathroom, tiny hair drawings by Melanie Bilenker record everyday moments in the artist’s life. “There’s not that much in this world that’s original,” Kiss says, “and she’s taking this old Victorian form and making it new.”

The house’s cozy scale suits Kiss, who used to work at home in what had been the church’s choir loft but found that the soaring volume felt a bit overwhelming. It’s no accident that so many of the objects that Kiss makes, and collects, are tiny. “The church is a ‘wow’ space,” she says, “but the scale of my work is smaller than a matchbox. When we walk down the street, Chris will see the building, and I’ll see the molding.”

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