Amulet:
Taraxacum Officinale, Diazepam 50mg, 13g healing stones

In our daily lives, we continue many superstitious practices, without consciously thinking about them despite knowing that they can’t be true...’knock on wood‘. In recent decades and more intensively post-pandemic, a renewed interest in amulets has emerged in various New Age and mainstream contexts. Behavioral scientist Stuart Vyse, posits in Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition “The absence of control over an important outcome creates anxiety. So, even when we know on a rational level that there is no magic, superstitions can be maintained by their emotional benefit.”

I have been conflating botanical medicinals, conventional psychopharmaca, and ‘healing stones’ in recent work, that considers the psychology of superstition, particularly as found in amuletic jewelry. I’m not such a fan of yellow, so this subject was a challenge.Of course I could have chosen to depict the dandelion puff in all its glory, but it kept falling apart.

So we are left with an image of dandelions, embedded with healing stones of similar color/pattern and hand engraved with an abstracted diagram of diazepam...to remind us of all the options. The compositional balance we expect - is not offered, and sometimes the stones blend into the background instead of showing off. These are subtle rebellions to encourage questions.

In jewelry’s function as a psychological and social tool, this dandelion amulet fortified with healing stones, offers a symbol of persistence, and resilience, to help serve as a balm for the human psyche in uncertain times. Personally I love this about jewelry, and I’m starting to like yellow.

Sondra Sherman is originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has been the Head of the Jewelry and Metalwork Program at San Diego State University, C since 2010. Sherman received the Diplom Degree (MFA) from the Academy of Fine Art in Munich Germany, where she resided for ten years. Sherman has been the recipient of many awards including Individual Artist Fellowships from the Rhode Island Council on the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Emerging Artists Fellowship, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Fulbright Scholarship for Study Abroad. Exhibited and published internationally, her work can be found in significant public and private collections including, The Design Museum, Munich, The Museum of Art and Design, NY, the Los Angeles County Museum,CA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art,TX, Renwick Gallery-Smithsonian Museum,DC, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.