The Discipline of Touch

Ani Han

I began this pendant with a question: is it possible to create a piece of jewelry that does not demonstrate, but gathers restores rhythm with a single, brief gesture.

The point of departure was a comb. Not its shape, but its function inspired me: one of the earliest tools with which humans brought order to chaos. Not through force, but through repetition. Mass / pause / mass. Rhythm as order.
I built the pendant around this rule.

On the outside a unified, biomorphic silence. The form needed to feel not “designed,” but inevitable like a polished stone that simply happened to appear in the right metal. I reworked the contour through iterations until the object settled into the palm like a pebble: without sharp decisions, without “details” that catch the eye.

Within this silence, structure appears: a zone of grooves. This is not decoration. It is a working surface a tactile interface. It can be read with a finger at any moment of the day, like a short pause that you activate yourself.
Then came the adjustment of balance the part that photographs rarely reveal.

The first prototype was almost monolithic beautiful in the hand, but too demanding on the neck. I reduced mass and adjusted the distribution of volume until the weight remained perceptible but stopped pressing becoming presence. In its final state, it settles at around 75 g: enough to feel the warmth of the metal and a calm sense of support, without the sensation of burden.

The second aspect was light. Gold loves noise: highlights, status, “look at me.” Here, it needed to behave differently to act as a material of presence. So I tuned the rhythm of the grooves like a mechanism: spacing, depth, and edge radii adjusted so that the finger glides and returns, and the polish remains clean without dirty breaks or unnecessary drama. And most importantly, the junction: the boundary between smoothness and rhythm must be architectural, like the transition from light to shadow, not like an applied pattern.

This object lives in two modes.
On the body, it almost falls silent: an even form, a calm light.
In the hand, it begins to work: the rhythm restores tempo.

If a piece of jewelry needs to be explained, it usually needs to be remade. This pendant does not want explanation. It is enough to touch it.