Hand fabricated in multiple layers of sterling silver, this landscape pendant depicts a graveyard laid in front of a small country church, in the shadow of the mountains. The silhouette of a tree, naked from season’s changing, and mists moving in under a Full Moon. The back is etched, and the rivulets left by the process of etching are reminiscent of a weathered and crumbling gravestone. An hourglass, a common symbol found on headstones, shows the sands have run out and now lie pooled at the bottom. A rose-cut hematite adorns the bail, which was crafted from a cast twig. Memento Mori.
“Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth”
-Thomas Gray, from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray is the quintessential example of the English graveyard poets of the pre-Romantic era, known for their gloomy meditations on mortality. From Wiki, the poem “embodies a meditation on death, and remembrance after death... the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure rustics buried in the churchyard.”