What do poetry and jewelry making have in common? The connection is clear for Rebecca Perea-Kane (who uses she/they pronouns). “I think to move from poetry to jewelry is easy; it’s the same way of working, but just in different mediums,” they say. “It’s a lot of working over the same detail, over and over, really closely.” At Thicket, their polished gem of a shop on Washington Avenue in Portland, the results of this attention to detail are evident all around, from the meticulous placement of jewelry in cases to the thoughtful setup of the small space, which they share with their partner’s business, Moonday Coffee.

Poetry was indeed Perea-Kane’s first passion, but as they note, “The market for professional poets is not enormous. I was very grateful to my graduate program to be a paid poet for three years of my life, but I was not expecting that to go onward.” Fortunately, they had other skills and interests to fall back on: “Before going to grad school, I had been working in design,” they explain. “I was working for a textile studio called Haptic Lab. They make quilts based on maps.” After some time in Europe and their graduate school interlude in Virginia, they, along with their partner David Kessel, began looking for a fresh start. Portland was high on their list. “I grew up in seacoast New Hampshire, and we would come to Portland. I love it here,” they say. “We were living in rural western Massachusetts right before this, in the Berkshires. Our town was so beautiful, but it wasn’t big enough.” Portland felt like the right size and demographic for the business plan they had been envisioning for a while: a combined retail and coffee space. 

They found the ideal spot in the Black Boxes on Washington Avenue. Kessel’s coffee shop (which he initially ran as a mobile coffee cart on the Eastern Promenade) occupies the back of the space, with a gleaming espresso machine and neatly stacked cups. The front of the space holds a series of pale wood and glass cases that showcase Perea-Kane’s jewelry. Pendants drape elegantly down linen panels, and rings tumble across the interiors of the cases. As one looks closely, silver and gold versions of natural items come into focus: a tiny milkweed pod, minuscule catbrier thorns, little ocean pebbles. All are perfect copies of the originals, thanks to Perea-Kane’s preferred method of lost wax casting.  

“In the lost wax process, you make a mold out of silicone or rubber,” Perea-Kane explains. “The object needs to have enough structural integrity so that when it’s pressed, it doesn’t break. So things like flowers or leaves wouldn’t work well, but seeds or teeth or bones will hold their shape. And then some things are kind of on the fence, like honeycomb or a chrysalis. For those, I have to paint the interior with wax to make it a bit sturdier.”

They continue, “Once I have that mold, I work with a casting house in the jewelry district in New York to do the next part of the process—it’s pretty typical for small, independent jewelry lines not to do that themselves. It’s a good way of having some help with the overall production. They take that mold, and they make wax copies from it. Then they encase the copies in plaster and pour the molten metal in, and the metal displaces the wax and takes on the shape of the original object.” There’s still more work for Perea-Kane to do back in their home studio. “When the casting house sends back the raw castings, I finish them and polish them, adding backs to earrings and soldering chains. There’s much to be done back here,” they say. “I really do have my hands on everything.”

“Hands-on” is a literal, not metaphorical, description for the loving attention Perea-Kane lavishes on their work. But each piece of Thicket jewelry does represent an idea: apple seed stud earrings stand for sweetness and curiosity, while spruce needle rings stand for “the feeling of quiet in a stand of evergreen trees.” Perea-Kane has highlighted that connection between artful words and artful craft once again.

Perfectly Preserved

Perea-Kane’s love of the natural world comes through in their choices of what to use for jewelry, both in inspiration (seed pods, thorns, pebbles) and materials (recycled gold and silver). “About 90 percent or so of my stuff is made from recycled metals. That’s really important to me,” says Perea-Kane. “I feel like there’s already so much gold that’s already been mined—we can just keep reusing it.” Here are some items found in the elegant jewelry cases at Thicket—don’t forget to grab an espresso from Moonday Coffee at the back of the shop to enjoy as you browse them.

• The pendants showcase small, perfect shapes, like honeycombs and tiny milkweed pods. They often hang from an oxidized silver chain that, Perea-Kane points out, has a couple of advantages: “It’s a really great contrast with both the sterling silver and the gold, but it also makes the price point more accessible.” 
• Perea-Kane makes both studs and delicate dangling earrings. Studs range in size from tiny blackberry thorns to larger chunks of phyllite, a metamorphic rock found on the coast of Maine. The dangling earrings include cast cardamom pods and calendula seeds.
• Perea-Kane fastens their silver or gold-plate permanent bracelets to a customer’s wrist with their tiny welder, which looks like a glue gun but, they explain, “has the same mechanism as the welding that happens on bridges.” As the name implies, permanent bracelets are meant to be worn all the time and are especially popular with bachelorette groups, Perea-Kane says.
• They cast their ring elements from brambles and honeycombs, as well as from twigs found in a robin’s nest and a tiny rodent pelvis found in an owl pellet. Perea-Kane points out some simple rings in the case, saying, “These are little stacking rings. I’m working on getting samples of the wedding bands here so that folks can actually see some examples.” 
• Wedding bands are a great example of the custom work they do. If you can’t find your perfect object in the shop, Perea-Kane can still make it for you. “I do a lot of custom natural object casting. I’ve cast all kinds of things, even teeth from pets and children,” they say. “They’re actually very cool! They make a nice little pendant.”