89 - MICHAEL GOOD: AN 18K GOLD TORQUE NECKLACE Of anticlastic crossover design, composed of two high-polished bands of tapering form, the slender terminals curving upwards into open loops, in 18K gold, signed M. Good, with maker's mark, inner diameter approximately 12.7cm

MICHAEL GOOD: AN 18K GOLD TORQUE NECKLACE Of anticlastic crossover design, composed of two high-polished bands of tapering form, the slender terminals curving upwards into open loops, in 18K gold, signed M. Good, with maker's mark, inner diameter approximately 12.7cm Condition Report: Stamped 750 for 18K gold Minor signs of wear, overall in good condition Total gross weight approx. 85g Michael Good is an American goldsmith and sculptor known for turning thin sheets of gold into jewellery with sweeping curves and a surprising lightness. When he moved from New York to rural Maine in 1969, he took with him gold melted down from earlier pieces and began working it with a handful of basic tools. While selling at craft fairs, he met the goldsmith Glenda Arentzen, who encouraged him to study with the Finnish metalsmith Heikki Seppä. Seppä showed Good how to hammer a sheet of metal so that it curves in opposite directions, like a saddle. The two went on refining the method, and Good recalls suggesting the name ‘anticlastic raising’ during a conversation in a sauna. He found that he could bring the edges of the sheet round to form a hollow tube, which gave his jewellery the volume of a solid form with very little weight. In some necklaces the gold itself has enough spring to open and settle back into shape without a clasp. The technique has a far older ancestor. Gold ribbon torcs, the twisted collars of Bronze Age and Iron Age Ireland, are hammered from a single strip into a tight double helix, and how this was done without steel tools had long puzzled Good. In 2000 he met Brian Clarke, a Wicklow silversmith chasing the same question, who brought him to Dublin to study the torcs in the National Museum of Ireland at first hand. Comparing the ancient gold with their own hammer work, the two men reconstructed how it was made: with a red deer antler doing the work of a steel stake, since gold this pure never needed anything harder. The method behind Good’s jewellery, it turned out, had been in Irish hands some three thousand years before.