2008–2018
During this decade, the structural language that began with the wooden ring widened into a broader investigation of the body, material memory, repetition, scale, and fabrication. The work moved outward from the finger into neckpieces, brooches, sculptural forms, lighting, and furniture, while the questions at its center remained closely related: how wood carries time, how a body completes an object, and how making can hold both handwork and contemporary technology.
By 2010, works such as Tie Me Not were carrying the logic of bending and repetition beyond the ring. Later neckpieces in the 360 Series and works such as The Held continued that movement, treating jewelry less as an isolated object and more as something completed through its relationship with the body.
The Ad Idem works made the prior life of material increasingly explicit. Salvaged wood was not approached as neutral stock; its previous use, age, associations, and physical history became part of the object. A 2016 studio inventory also documents Ad Idem works combining salvaged wood with 3D-printed elements, showing that historical material and contemporary fabrication were already being brought into the same conversation.
Published documentation also identifies Nothing Gold Can Stay (2009) as padauk, exotic wood from Norm Sartorius, and silver—an early documented example of this material lineage.
Selected publication documentation →
Organic Coil and Arc Series works developed bending into a visible structural language. Curves were no longer only a solution to making wood wearable; they became a way of building tension, rhythm, volume, and space. Brooches, necklaces, and repeated coil forms allowed the material to behave somewhere between jewelry, drawing, and small sculpture.
Published in Ornament, Vol. 36.2, documented examples include Organic Coil (hickory, 2010, 7.62 × 12.7 × 7.62 cm) and Arc Series Brooch (hickory, walnut, sterling silver, 2011, 6.35 × 1.27 × 12.7 cm), both photographed by Erin Beckman.
The same questions also moved beyond jewelry. Walking Series sculptures, cold-bent tables, and Arc Series lighting tested related ideas at larger scales. These works are included in the archive selectively—not as a separate furniture or design practice, but as evidence that the studio was using scale to test the same material and structural vocabulary.
A 2017 studio visit published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago records this expansion in place: bent-wood jewelry and Organic Coils alongside lighting and furniture in the Pilsen studios. The article also documents a flat-packing bent-wood lamp design and notes that two lamps were selected for offices at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. It provides an independent institutional record of how the same bending language moved across jewelry, object, and architectural scale.
Archive photographs from the Chicago studio also show bent-wood display structures built to hold and illuminate jewelry. These were not separate from the making. The studio was considering how the work met the body, the case, the wall, and the room. Designing the conditions around an object became another way of testing scale, visibility, repetition, and the movement of a curved line through space.
Traditional woodworking and contemporary fabrication increasingly occupied the same continuum. Bending, laminating, hand tools, metal components, digital processes, and 3D printing were used according to what the work required. Technology did not replace the hand; it expanded the range of forms and relationships that could be explored without losing direct contact with material.
The CNC-cut bending form shown above was used to hold thin strips of wood in their curve while drying. That process produced Coil Brooch (2013), now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, where it is catalogued as accession 2013.56. View MAD collection record →. Reyes exhibited at LOOT: MAD About Jewelry 2013, curated by jewelry specialist Bryna Pomp. At MAD, Ursula Ilse-Neuman was Curator of Jewelry during this period. The artist remembers Pomp and Ilse-Neuman as being directly involved in the acquisition at LOOT; that specific detail is retained here as artist recollection rather than as an independently documented museum credit.
This period is documented in Ornament, Vol. 36.2, Patrick R. Benesh-Liu’s “The Irrepressible Spirit”; Andrea DiNoto’s “A Bent for Wood”, Metalsmith, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2012), pp. 14–15; and the 2017 Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago studio feature by Sarah Grosspietsch and Gustav Reyes, “Artists Up Close: Witnessing the Beautiful Manipulation of Wood.” See Press, Interviews & Writing → and the CV → for the broader exhibition and publication record.
Outward Expression, 2012 →
A Historical Record, 2012 →
Woodworker… it’s an honest word. — Sam Maloof, 2011 →
Press & Writing →
The questions developed here continue in current works including The Interval Brooch, Open Coil Brooch, and Held Knot Neckpiece.
This page is part of an archive in development. Additional works and images will be added only when their dates, materials, and provenance can be documented responsibly.
