It was a snowy day in Paris, the kind where the Louvre's marble floors squeaked under wet boots and the galleries were quieter than usual. My son was eight months old, bundled into a stroller, just starting to reach for things.

We wandered into the Greek and Roman antiquities. He was awake but calm, the way babies sometimes are when there's a lot to look at. I stopped in front of a small case full of fragments. Not the famous statues. Not the things you go to the Louvre to see. Just broken pieces of marble and plaster, each one having survived against all odds.

There was a piece of the Three Graces. Just a fragment, three figures still recognizable in their togetherness, the rest of the relief gone forever. My son reached for it through the glass. I don't know why that moment hit me the way it did. Maybe because he had no idea what he was looking at. Maybe because two thousand years separated him from the hands that had carved it, and he was reaching for it anyway. Maybe because as a new mother I was thinking constantly about what gets passed on, what survives, what gets lost.

I started noticing the fragments everywhere after that. A dog on a funerary stela in another room, the rest of the stone broken away, but the dog still seated, still waiting. A broken Ionic column from somewhere ordinary, somebody's house. Two lovers in profile, the surrounding stone gone, the kiss preserved.

These weren't the grand objects. They weren't the things curators fought over. They were the things the earth had held onto by accident: bits of ordinary life, bits of decoration, bits of love. They survived because they were small enough, or buried deep enough, or simply lucky. I thought about all the things that have crumbled. Whole cities. Whole libraries. Whole languages. And then these little pieces, these accidents of preservation, ending up in a glass case in Paris on a snowy day in January.

I wanted to make something that carried that thread. Not reproductions of the famous, perfect things. The fragments. The accidents. The pieces that survived because the earth held them, and time, for once, was careless enough to let them through. The Fragments collection is five solid gold pendants cast from those broken survivors: the Three Graces, the broken column, the lovers, the hound, and the Orphic tablet. Each one preserves its broken edges exactly as found. They are not perfect things. They are pieces of what survived. My son is older now. He still reaches for things.