Susan Bell
Bell’s process honors both material and method.
Artist Susan Bell creates jewelry grounded in centuries of tradition, cultural exchange, and reverence for craft. Her work draws from ancient metallurgical practices rooted in the Andean region of Ecuador, where indigenous communities mined and worked gold long before the arrival of the Spanish. The 18-karat gold used in her pieces comes from small, local mines in the mountains surrounding Cuenca, an area rich with archaeological evidence of early gold adornment.
Cultured pearls from Japan and China and semiprecious, rough-cut stone beads from India are personally sourced at gem shows in the United States and hand-carried to Ecuador. There, local jewelers set each element using the traditional clavo technique, securing stones and pearls through the center with a nail and fastening them from behind with a twist or knot.
Her designs echo the jewelry worn by indigenous women in Andean village marketplaces and reflect forms introduced by Spanish craftsmen in the late 16th century. Bell has traced these influences directly, discovering near-identical earrings to her Españolas in Portuguese state treasury archives.