symbols from Navajo cosmology are used to create gridded designs

O’Rourke’s aesthetic is concerned with pure metals. She used stones in the
very eorly years, but since defining her style, has not continued using them because
“stones seem superfluous to the work.” The shopes she fabricates occasionally take
on a “stone quality.” Two brocelets, Ri 1 and Rl 2 are punctuated with a chunky piece
of silver or brass, set off center. “Rl” stands for “river stones”; she imagined the
shapes during a camping trip with her husband. In O’Rourke’s vocobulary, the metal
doesn’t have “topics”, but if hos “pieces” and “chunks.” Its aesthetics oreunderstoted,
functional, and wearoble. To O’Rourke, pieces must work, and “work” means that
the object provides the wearer with the tactile, sensuol qualities of movement, fluidity
and integration with fhe body – a subtle and decorative enhancement.

Seven years ogo morked O’Rourke’s “change,” when, persuaded by a jeweler
friend that she needed to subcontract more of lhe work, she left her originals with
an Albuquerque caster. The originals from the 1970s and ’80s that she continues to
show have a cherishable quality. One wants to be feel them, os if the forms reveal
their process of evolutionory development, long before ony trips to the caster.
The beginnings of O’Rourke’s jewelry making coincided with the end of her
first marriage. Most of her eorly pieces were lorge, flat-hammered silver, inspired by
Egyption ond pre-Columbian designs. She made a linked belt of elaborate brass
eagles, wings outspread and overlaid with silver feathers and each one with a
turquoise eye. After the belt she created arm-cuffs to be worn above the elbow, lorge
earrings, and o breastplate that draped from the collarbone to the back.
By 1972 O’Rourke hod met Michael, her second husband, who worked at the
Arizona Sonora Desert Museum “and could bring home lots of feothers“. His zeal for
animal life – badgers to seals – helped inspire many depictions in metal, O’Rourke
began working more dimensionally, fabricating pieces out of sheet to get double layers
that would be rough on the outside and smooth on the inside. “I never drew anything,”
she says. “I used scrap silver and had a strong feeling obout the size and shape.
I would stort with a heap of scrap on the board, a tool in one hand and a hardware
store torch in the other, with the tank bolanced on my shoulder. I’d heat the metal
to a viscous state ond work it like clay. At a certain temperature I’d cool, quench, hammer
and heat it ogain. I did this three or four or five times until I’d get the texture
and shape I wanted and start working with a hammer, then file ond grind [the work].”
By the late 1970s O’Rourke had added rings to her line and was making
Koras, which is her name for the pendants grouped together and worn on cords. These
biomorphic forms were hand-fabricated from silver, copper, and brass. Old Novajo
stamps became another inspiration and tool for O’Rourke. The stamps which have symbols
from Navajo cosmology are used to create gridded designs directing both the
form and the iconography of the pieces. Today the stamps are always near her handat
the workbench.

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