Jun 18, 2007

Animals make Mineral – Jewelry designer is a study in oppositesBy Niki SullivanTheNewsTribune.com

Lisa Kinoshita, in black horn-rimmed glasses, bobbed black hair and red lipstick, sets a small gift box on the glass counter and instructs a guest to open it.The thumb-sized skull inside is in perfect condition, right down to the translucent brain cavity.

“It’s an ermine,” she says, excitedly.

In any other setting, a weasel skull in a gift box would give pause. But in Kinoshita’s hands at Mineral, her small jewelry shop on St. Helens, it seems natural.

Behind her is a bay of mostly large exotic insects in shadowboxes, most of their knobby joints and delicate parts intact. Miniature silver antlers dangle from a set of earrings displayed on the glass counter to her left. Elongated incisor-shaped freshwater pearls and hearty, weathered water buffalo horns are strung as necklaces in the cases around her.

Kinoshita creates jewelry out of most of the above, plus stones, gems, leather, metal and bones. It’s the kind of work that gets noticed by Elle magazine, The New York Times, museum stores and chic women.

But “hairy Northwest men” are equally fans of her work. The ermine skull came from a man who wanted her to make him a German hunting talisman. While Kinoshita referred him to someone trained in that craft, he’s bringing back a salmon jaw for her to use in another piece.

“I can’t wait,” she said.

If the idea of a thoroughly modern woman using bronze replicas of a fossilized shark tooth, cross-cuts of agates and deerskin to make hip, modern jewelry seems a contradiction, there’s more.

She creates her bold pieces, sold at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Seattle Art Museum, among others, in a modest sub-leased studio near the railroad tracks in Nalley Valley.

Read complete article.