Experience the diamond desire and design

COPYRIGHT ROYAL ONTARIO

Niki Kavakonis’ Tip of the Iceberg ring on display at the ROM looks similar to Stephen Webster’s Knight’s Ring. 

Picture yourself standing in front of a haloed gold diamond, the third largest in the world, the size of a throat lozenge. Diamonds like these earn their beauty in hell. They stew in Earth’s molten mantel, rise to the fissures of the Earth and wait in the darkness. There is violence in their natural birth, shooting out with magma into their sunny destiny and, just as you would the umbilical cord and placenta of a newborn child, you wash them, wipe the muck off them, cut them and polish them. You hold them up to the light and they become your baby,  shining with lovely cubist fire and shards of light. I suppose this genesis, this romantic birthing, gives these stones some credibility beyond their superficial worth. There is no more befitting a backdrop to “The Nature of Diamonds” exhibition than the Michael Chin-Lee Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) – a protruding building of crystalline angles that casts its shadow over you. Like a mine, it houses the gems underneath. The show starts off like blown-up pages of a textbook, cerebral in its graphs, its photo of tie-wearing scientists in a lab, interactive display case demonstrations and the stars of the show: the hard, shiny, muscular body of the diamonds themselves. It’s not exactly the most romantic introduction
to a conception so sexual as diamond formations – with its recipe of heat, pressure and friction, and its long and hard birth inside our planet. And, from the darkness beneath, let there be (glittering) light.

If you love diamonds just for their looks, this exhibit aims to change that. The exhibit wants you to fall “deeper” in love by introducing you to the geologic origins of the object of your lust. What object other than these stones is birthed into the world not as an infant but millions, even billions, of years old? Wearing one is akin to sporting a museum piece, a fossil, a beautiful, light-loving relic of the earth. This all reminds me of a woman I met at the exhibit, one Niki Kavakonis, who was pointed out to me by a ROM staff member. On her left ring finger was a band of white gold that boasted a tiny stone in its centre. The uncut and unpolished stone is trapped in a square hole in the middle of a wide, solid beam that projects from one side of the ring across your finger and hangs suspended there in an incomplete circle. The octahedral angle of the stone protrudes like the tip of an iceberg and, at the bottom, you can see its other half sunk, the band designed to complete the floating iceberg illusion while remaining wearable. The ring, however, looks better in the display case, cast in dramatic lighting, than on Kavakonis’ hand. This is what is so seductive about the stone, though; it is not something you admire in the distance, but something you have to inspect close enough to breathe on it. The Tip of the Iceberg, as it is called, owes its unconventional beauty to its effortlessness. This architectural ring, inspired by Canada’s landscape and Frank Lloyd Wright’s building Fallingwater, is a risky design.

Diamonds like these earn their beauty in hell. They stew in Earth’s molten mantel, rise to the fissures of the Earth and wait in the darkness 

It sacrifices shine and glamour for concept, story and innovation. This abstract mimicry of one’s environment is a sentiment echoed by Alan Bronstein, a fancy colour diamond trader-dealer from New York also present at the event. His piece, the Aurora Butterfly of Peace, is basically a collection of different cut and coloured diamonds arranged in the stylized shape of a butterfly. “Everything that we do as artists or creators is really just trying to mimic the beauty and perfection of nature,” Bronstein says about his design. The piece
suffers from being too simple, though. A diverse collection like his, a product of 12 years of collecting and selecting diamonds, seems to deserve a more unique and expressive presentation, like Kavakonis’ Iceberg ring. But just when I decided the Iceberg was unique, I came across a ring on the De Beers website which looked awfully familiar. It was a wide, clunky un-closed band of white gold, the edge of which can be engraved with the owner’s initial, and topped by an octahedral rough diamond. It’s by English designer Stephen Webster
who, earlier this year, designed a collection inspired and modelled by Christina Aguilera. Coincidence, or copyright infringement? This ring, called Knight’s Ring, is a more glamorous,
commercial piece of jewellery adorned with fancy brown princess-cut diamonds along the side of the plate that holds the rough diamond centerpiece, whereas Kavakonis’ is a simple, uncompromising and unassuming design.

“At the moment, I’m not really sure that there’s a copyright issue,” Kavakonis tells me. “I’m not the only designer using rough – I prefer natural, uncut – diamonds, although most of them, like Stephen, use what is usually called ‘industrial’ diamonds. “These are diamonds that are not considered gem quality, that are dark yellow, green or brown and often have a mottled surface texture, whereas I look for good quality diamonds that could be cut, and my setting and design is unique.” Webster admitted in a press release for the Burning Rocks collection that he was inspired by De Beers’ Talisman collection. “For most of my life in jewellery, I have been referred to as a ‘rough diamond,’” explains Webster in the press release.
“So when Guy Leymarie, CEO of De Beers, asked me to design a collection of men’s jewellery with a brief to express the mystique and power of rough diamonds, I was drawn to the concept.” Webster’s collection, called Burning Rocks, was launched in summer 2007. Kavakonis sets the record straight: “[The Iceberg] has been in limited production since 2004, and Webster’s rings are CAD renderings, not actual rings yet.” De Beers’ lasting and effective campaign tag line, “Diamonds are forever” has become synonymous with the wedding vow, “Till death do us part.” The diamond ring has become an emblem of love and commitment, and Kavakonis and Webster’s designs are both inspired concepts, injecting life into the tired design of this symbol. Diamonds do take almost forever to form and can last forever.

Yet far from its attributed glamour, the diamond, which comes from the Latin word carbo meaning “charcoal,” has its lowly origin in carbon, one of the most abundant chemical elements there is. Its characteristic glittering can come from any source of light, which the diamond slows down and temporarily traps inside its dense atomic carbon structure – a structure tightly compressed by heat and pressure in the Earth’s mantle where it was formed. It even comes naturally in different colours – watercolor foliage, pale twilights, petal pink sunsets and even The Beatles’ “tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” If you’ve seen the film Blood Diamond, let me offer this redeeming alternative image – we are that young village girl playing in a pile of rubble and spotting something yellow and translucent. This is the Incomparable Diamond, the most valuable piece displayed in the centre of ROM’s diamond
exhibit, and we don’t think for a second that this rock is something to fight over. It’s a lucky find – something to be enjoyed and admired – and ours to keep.