Turquoise in Art: An Ancient Material Reimagined in Contemporary Ritual Work

I’ve worked with turquoise for years not just the “Turquoise gemstone jewelry-store” kind, but the kind you grind from the earth with your own hands. The kind that stains your fingertips and reminds you that color, before it ever became a hex code, was a mineral. A good trade. A medicine. A story.

The Cerrillos Hills in New Mexico, are one of the oldest turquoise mining sites in the world. When you walk there, you feel how far back human color-memory goes. Turquoise wasn’t decoration it was cosmology. A bridge between earth and sky. A material with responsibilities.

So while modern galleries frame my “turquoise artworks” as contemporary mixed media, for me, the work is old. Older than pigment. Older than paint. It’s an echo of the way color once lived in the world.

Cerrillos: Where Turquoise Was a Language Before It Was an Ornament

Long before borders and art markets, people came to Cerrillos for these stones. Pueblo communities and their ancestors carried turquoise hundreds and thousands of miles, trading it for macaw feathers, seashells, copper bells, pigments, and ceremonial items.

This wasn’t commerce. It was a ritual exchange color for color, meaning for meaning.

Turquoise marked prayer bundles, masks, offerings, garments, and altars. It wasn’t “accessory.” It was identity, protection, cosmology.

In my studio, when I work with that ancient mineral I’m conscious that I’m creating with a material that has passed through so many generations, lands, hands, cultures, migrations, and spiritual systems than any of us will ever fully comprehend.

Turquoise isn’t just a stone. It’s a history with memory..

Turquoise as a Ceremonial Stone — Not a Fashion Trend

Carve turquoise and it reveals what it really is:  

• Earth turned into color.  
• Geology turned into a symbol.  
• Sky and water alchemized in Earth.

I mix ground turquoise into paintings in a different way than early makers embedded it into masks and ritual objects. The pigment wants to behave on its own terms for a new time it clumps, refracts, shifts tone with light, and refuses to disappear.

• It resists becoming decoration. as something pure and sacred.
• I don’t use turquoise. I collaborate with it.

A Global Stone: Persia, India, Egypt, and the Dutch Masters

Turquoise has circled the planet for millennia.

• Ancient Egyptians placed turquoise in ceremonial objects, tombs, and protective amulets.  
• Iranian artists carved and set Persian turquoise as early as the 1st millennium BCE.  
• In Mughal India, turquoise symbolized heaven and divine order.  
• European Renaissance and Dutch Master portraiture often included Persian turquoise rings, painted with obsessive detail to telegraph wealth, love, or social status.

Turquoise has always meant something safety, sky, rebirth, connection, intention, protection, longing.

It’s a mineral that carries mythology no matter where it travels.

My Contemporary Turquoise Works

My turquoise artwork sits somewhere between ritual object, painting, and artifact.  

I work with:  

• ground Southwest turquoise  
• oxidized metals  
• earth pigments  
• atmospheric layers of paint and mineral sediment   

The pieces hold memory the same way the stone does. They’re built through repetition sifting, crushing, layering, embedding, burnishing. I’m not easily satisfied, and tend to destroy myc works in the process of creation, the layers of time and emotional strate in pigmnet creating a work of wonder and energy. The process feels more like an offering than painting.

Turquoise does not want to be a flat color. It wants to be terrain.

Why Turquoise Endures in Contemporary Art

Because the world is starving for things that feel real.  

• Hand-touched  
• Time-bearing  
• Earth-grown

Turquoise isn’t digital, smooth, or obedient. It’s complicated and imperfect like anything with a long memory. In an art world full of high-gloss surfaces and LED light, turquoise brings people back to something ancient and human. Its flaws are its beauty. Its geology is its narrative. Mythology has been its voice..

Collectors tell me the pieces feel grounding like they hum or hold some quiet protective presence. That’s the stone doing what it has always done. People often ask what they’re made of. In truth its all love and agic.

Turquoise as Material, Myth, and Messenger

Turquoise artwork is not about a trend.  

• It’s about continuity between continents, eras, and cosmologies
• It’s the same mineral that traveled from Cerrillos to Mesoamerica  
• the same stone painted into Dutch aristocratic portraits  
• the same pigment pressed into prayer bundles
• the same yet infinte sky-color buried in tombs  
• The same mineral dust is now suspended in my paintings
• One material, many worlds

That’s why I work with turquoise:  

• Because it collapses time, memory, trade routes, myths, and rituals into a single pigment.  
• It’s not simply jewelry.  
• It’s an ancient language, still spoken.