IMPORTANT:  This necklace is a special offering. We do not know if more will be created and for that reason, recommend Express Shipping with Signature required upon delivery to ensure it arrives safely in your hands.

This necklace is Ready To Ship and will leave the studio in 3 - 5 business days.

Please Note: This necklace has been created with a 30" bar link chain.

The Solitude Keys are composed entirely of bat wing and leg bones, and are meant to represent our solitary journey through our personal Underworlds.

While this necklace is limited in nature, we also have a single Solitude Key Necklace and Solitude Key Earrings that are made to order.

Keys:

Skeleton keys have long been an obsession of mine. My godmother is an auctioneer and took me along to auctions and estate sales. Treasure for me were always the wooden boxes filled with greasy and dirt caked keys, beautiful with their time earned patina, with their memories and silent stories.  As a kid, I imagined every beautiful key I came across no matter how small or large, belonged to a haunted house. Even the tiny keys that came with my school fair diary were special to me. Keys have that sort of resiliency that many other sorts of old objects don’t, they survive the wear and tear of misuse, they surface like relics from the muck of time.

Keys are an ancient tool, created first by the Ancient Egyptians in wood and modified by the Romans in metal and made small enough to be kept on a person, coined as the first ‘skeleton keys’. These were used, as now, to lock doors and boxes or 'safes', to protect precious objects and people. Thusly one of the mundane and ubiquitous tool has also come to garner potent symbolism over time and has been woven into a current everyday object that even digital technology can’t seem to make obsolete. At the time of my writing this, I still use metal keys to gain entrance to my apartment and studio; I moved out of a house in Philadelphia in 2020 in one of the oldest parts of the city that still employed the use of skeleton keys. Perhaps the key is an object where the old world and the new continually shoulder up against each other, no matter how much modern technology tries to replace them.

As a talismanic jewel the key is a liminal object representing a potent tension and duality as it can both lock and unlock, making the person who holds the key one on a threshold.

*For locking: Being able to lock something behind you will always give the power and feeling of protection, therefore keys will always have the symbolism of protection embedded in them. The first key I can remember owning was a tiny key that fit to a tiny lock that latched onto a diary I owned in elementary school where I kept all of my secrets. This consisted of all of the titles of the books I’d write, but they sounded like spells, things I desperately wanted to change about myself; revenge I’d like to take on bullies. These days, protecting my loved ones, my heart, and extending protection to those I can feels most important to me. Feeling safe and helping others feel safe in my presence is something I'm always thinking about, and the presence of a key against my body helps remind me of these tenants and makes me feel safe.

For unlocking: Keys as objects that can 'unlock' show up as symbols across cultures. It’s a symbol of gaining access: for some it's about knowledge and wisdom or about gaining access to higher or unearthly realms: Saint Peter was known to hold the keys to heaven while Hecate is known to hold the keys to the unseen world/ the gates of death. As an initiatory symbol, it suggests garnering levels of knowledge that lead upwards on your path, or crossing thresholds of the unconscious. It also suggests the ability of survival, of being able to find 'a way out', of reaching a place where you are able to unlock or solve an obstacle that was complex or troubling, such as a Sphinx's riddle.

Bats:

Bats and their cast wing and leg bones have long been a component I’ve used in my visual library as a way of creating a personal visual language. As nocturnal creatures, I feel a kinship with their natural predilection for the night time hours, but I’m also interested in how they use sonar to ‘see’, how as a metaphor bats as liminal creatures also remind us to look closer with our other senses, a way of ‘seeing the unseen.’ It’s my hope and intention that pairing them with other chthonic imagery and myth further adds to the visual meaning I’m aiming for, creating a collage of personal ideas while also tethering these physical jeweled objects to the spirit of the bat ( and other natural objects in the case of other jewels in my collection ) and to the spirit of the myths I’m invoking.