Inspired by the Ancient World

Artist Bio

From a very early age, Mary Blum felt deeply connected to the ancient world. Within a year or two of the Scythian exhibit, the international tour of King Tutankhamun's treasures came to LACMA, and Mary once again found herself pulled into antiquity. She began taking Latin in middle school, an endeavour that she continues to pursue through her teaching to this day. In addition to the beauties of the language, Mary was deeply attracted to the gold-work of the Greeks and the Romans. Essentially, from the age of eight on, all things ancient drew her as the sun draws the sunflower.  

When she began her graduate work in Anglo-Saxon literature, Mary found a new treasure-horde of inspiration in the gold-work of the ancient Celts, Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. She also discovered that Old English and Old Norse now vied with Latin for her attention, and she ended up completing her dissertation on the ethic of the comitatus in Old English heroic poetry. While writing this book, she had the privilege to work with primary documents at the Imperial War Museum and the British Library (London) as well as the archives at Cambridge and Oxford, but it was the British Museum, with its incredible collections of ancient gold-work, that ate up all of her free moments over those amazing summers of study and writing.

During that time, her jewelry business was born. All of the elements of antiquity that had been germinating in her imagination since she was eight blossomed, and, after completing her Ph.D., then in her fifth year of teaching Latin in San Francisco, she decided to become a goldsmith herself. She enrolled in the Revere Academy of Jewelry Arts and took classes from some of the most accomplished goldsmiths on the west coast, including Alan Revere himself. At the Revere Academy, the training was classical, focusing on the old European traditions of goldsmithing, and Mary learned how to do everything from pouring an ingot and drawing her own wire to granulating with high-carat gold to create decorative motifs, which of course was a technique that she had first encountered so many years before with the Scythian gold. 

Although she continues to teach Latin, Mary heart lies at her bench. In her Corte Madera studio, she pours and forges; she draws and fabricates; she granulates and sets; and she finds that all of her designs in some way call her back to the ancient world, her first and finest love.