Yellow Serpentine and Heishi Six Strand Necklace Santo Domingo

The extraordinary chartreuse color is what first draws the eye to Our Yellow Serpentine Six-Strand Santo Domingo Necklace, but it is the workmanship that makes this piece truly exceptional. Hundreds of tiny serpentine beads have been individually hand-cut into precise little cubes and gathered into six luxurious strands, creating a necklace unlike any Santo Domingo piece Jean Marie has encountered before. The stones have a wonderful translucency, shifting from brilliant citron yellow to chartreuse as they catch the light. Chartreuse has always been one of Jean Marie’s favorite colors, and here its intensity feels particularly beautiful: vivid, sophisticated and surprisingly easy to wear.

This piece recalls similar notes of chartreuse, citron and lime green that appear throughout so many of our Italian silks. Against those richly colored prints, the serpentine becomes luminous, picking up a seemingly minor color in the silk and suddenly bringing it forward. It is precisely the sort of unexpected combination Jean Marie loves—Italian textile and Pueblo jewelry, created worlds apart yet brought together through an extraordinary instinct for color. Worn against white, black or a simple neutral, the necklace becomes the color story entirely.

The remarkable beauty of this piece lies in the handwork. This female Santo Domingo artisan has cut, drilled, shaped, polished and strung an extraordinary number of tiny serpentine cubes, maintaining enough consistency for six individual strands to fall together with remarkable fluidity. Cube-shaped stone beads are far less commonly encountered than traditional rounded or disc-shaped heishi, and their flat polished surfaces catch the light differently as they move, giving the necklace its distinctive glimmer. What appears wonderfully modern is, in fact, the result of intensely traditional hand skills and countless hours of work.

 Jean Marie believes that patronizing artists such as this one matters enormously. This degree of handwork is increasingly precious as fewer members of younger generations choose to learn the painstaking techniques required to make jewelry entirely by hand.

You will  never encounter another necklace quite like this one. The combination of brilliant chartreuse serpentine, hundreds of diminutive hand-cut cubes and six cascading strands makes it an exceptional piece even within the world of Santo Domingo jewelry. There is only one, and pieces this distinctive cannot simply be reordered once they are gone. It is exactly what Jean Marie hopes to find when she searches for jewelry for Pax Philomena: something created by an artist rather than manufactured to a formula, something unmistakably individual, and something that may never cross our paths again.

Length 19" with sterling silver clasp

Made in New Mexico, USA

Strands: 6