Jacob Albee Goldsmith
Burlington, Vermont

Reull Vallis Necklace

One of Jacob Albee’s beloved pastimes with his young children is looking at pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope on the NASA website, reading books about space, and watching documentaries about the space program. “It is not unusual for me to get inspiration from celestial phenomena, but having young kids is a catalyst that helps me see and learn more than I would be likely to do on my own,” he says.

Albee purchased a red-pink 6.02-carat fine cushion-cut rhodolite garnet, which was “practically alive, it is so bright and beautiful,” and he knew it would be perfect for a large suspension necklace he wanted to design. He set the stone in a full bezel that’s suspended by double cable chains on either side, which keep it from rotating or flipping. Then, he attached the chains to a gold frame soldered to a large slab of Gibeon meteorite with a particularly dynamic natural edge. Because the meteorite piece has a natural “valley” to it, with a great pattern and crust edge, he started playing off the shape he had cut out. Albee says that the meteorite naturally lends itself to cosmic themes, and the color of the stone led him to Mars.

“The shape of the meteorite edge really seemed like a valley, with gravity and distance and flow. It was planetary, not a star.”

Once he started looking at reference materials online, he found an article about the Reull Vallis (Gaelic for “planet”) valley on Mars that appears to have been carved by water, and it just seemed a perfect fit. He etched the meteorite to reveal the Widmanstätten pattern, and then added different-sized diamonds to convey the depth and movement of a river. One region of the Reull Vallis is estimated to be 4 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep. Reading about the scale of this Martian river pushed him to add more and more stones to achieve “a great sense of movement and power, like the river that left such a huge geological feature behind.”