The memory of silver.

• Author: Malatesta, Parisina
• Position: Jewelry designer Ester Ventura

From the terraces of Ester Ventura's house in Lima, just a few steps from her workshop on Malecon Iglesias, in Chorrillos, the bay is often shrouded in a rose-colored mist, and one's gaze is drawn to the broad Pacific horizon, which appears suspended in space and time. The atmosphere seems charged with the mystery of Peruvian legend.

A similar feeling is evoked by Ventura's avant-garde jewelry designs. Their unusual quality or, perhaps, secret is in the artist's combination of authentic objects and fragments of centuries-old pre-Columbian cultures in silver: Chavin beads, bits of Paracas or Nasca textiles or Huari cloth, Mochica objects, elongated Chimu mullu shell beads, monkey bone carved by hand in the Peruvian Amazon, ceramic shards, mother-of-pearl, turquoise, and feathers. As Lima musician Manongo Mujica has written of Ventura, "Her life is to work in the past, centuries ago, when jewels of light fashioned in silver fell from the dark blue sky of Cuzco."

Ventura intuitively connects to the mythical, perceiving the ungraspable content of materials lost over the passage of years. Joining the ancient and modem, she seems to summon the pre-Columbian spirit of a piece without replicating it. Instead, she reedits and revives it, like an interpreter, a bridge between yesterday and today, elegantly developing an aesthetic that transcends even the most contemporary approach.

"I take up these pieces," Ventura once said, "study them, finger them, and decide how they should be presented. I offer them a new destiny. I don't change their character. I respect their original form and their' essence. They themselves suggest the design to me."

Her workshop is where the design takes shape, in the hands of seven silversmiths from all over Peru--Cuzco, Ayacucho, Iquitos, Apurimac, and Huancayo--masters of the techniques of their ancestors. Ventura spends many hours a day in her workshop, an old house decorated in blue and red, in contrast to the predominant earthen tones of the city. She may be found in deep conversation with the silversmiths or, passing by a work site, she may touch a piece, rub it with her fingers, feel it with her hands. And, while it is rare to find a moment to speak with her about herself, everything around Ventura expresses her persona.

Ventura's work has received a number of prizes and has been displayed in more than thirty exhibitions in the Americas and in Europe. In the title alone, one such exhibition, The Memory of Silver, is...