Floral Earrings

Small in scale but concentrated in meaning, floral earrings in sterling represent one of the MATL workshop's most enduring forms. Matilde Poulat's choice of flowers as a recurring motif was not decorative convenience — as Morrill records, her vocabulary of doves, flowers, and tiny bells was deliberately rooted in Mexican folk art and the Mixtec gold jewelry unearthed at Monte Alban in 1932 (Morrill, 1994, p. 216). Where contemporary makers were drawing on modernist abstraction, Poulat reached into the pre-Conquest visual world and pressed it into handwrought silver.

The workshop that developed this vocabulary grew into a substantial enterprise, with dozens of silversmiths working in the taller by the early wartime years. The baroque repoussé technique practiced there — Morrill notes that Chato Castillo carried elements of it into early Los Castillo production after spending time in the taller — gave MATL jewelry its characteristic presence: organic surface relief formed from within the metal rather than cast.

The mark "MATL," registered in 1934 and carried forward by Poulat's nephew Ricardo Salas after her death in 1960, anchors each piece in a tradition Poulat built over nearly three decades; objects dating to her own working lifetime carry particular interest.