“The Earth is continuously changing,” says Jenny Cherney, geologist and jeweler, as she steps to the doorway of her tiny downtown shop and looks expectantly out at the world (or what’s visible of it this warm morning on Kentucky St.). She waves at a little girl walking past, holding the hand of her mother.
“The Earth is always moving and evolving,” Cherney continues, “even if it’s something we can’t see on a day to day basis.”
Turning back to the interior of Spiral Jewelry and Artisery - which will mark its one-year anniversary on Saturday - Cherney takes in the array of glittering objects filling the narrow store and adds, “I love that humans, for thousands of years, have always decorated themselves with the Earth, with rocks and gems and jewels and gold, all the beautiful things that our planet makes, and we see around us all the time - if we happen to be looking.”
If Cherney sometimes sounds like a poet cross-pollinated with an artist and a scientist, there’s good reason for it. A trained geologist and hydrogeologist, Cherney says she’s always had an artistic streak, but for years never knew how to reconcile it with her other interests. It wasn’t until she’d spent years as a consultant - mainly working in the soil and groundwater remediation business - that she realized she needed a change of her own.
“I worked in environmental litigation,” she explains, “looking at soil and water that had been contaminated, asking all the obvious questions - how did the contaminant get there? Where is it? How do we clean it up? Who did it, and who owes money to who, because of it?”
Even now, discussing that earlier work clearly energizes Cherney.
“Water is really important,” she says. “Water is core to civilization. It’s core to a lot of things. I like processes. I like geologic processes, and water is a process. It’s always moving, and rocks are always forming. I can go outside and look around and see all of the geologic processes that created the place I am standing on. And hydrogeology is a very active form of that, one that you can see in real time.”
Unfortunately, the nuts-and-bolts reality of being a consultant eventually became more about managing others and studying charts than it was about rocks, water and mysterious contaminants.
“I got to a spot where I wasn’t getting to do much actual hydrogeology anymore,” allows Cherney, who grew up in Petaluma. She attended Ursuline High School in Santa Rosa, before heading off to college in Irvine, and eventually Atlanta. It was there, working in a rock shop shortly after earning a degree in psychology and sociology, that Cherney first realized that she had a passion for rocks and fossils. That awareness led her back to school, where she earned a degree in geology, and soon after got her first job as a hydrogeologist, tracing the path of water as it moves through rocks and soil.
Eventually, she says, her own personal path brought her back to Petaluma, and not long after, to a whole new career.
“I have three young boys,” she points out. “I knew I wanted a job that allowed me to make the boys my focus, when they needed me. I also knew I wanted a job that would feed me as a human.”
She discovered that new career when some close friends from Atlanta - who owned several jewelry stores-invited her on a buying trip overseas. That’s when she decided she wanted to design and sell jewelry - works of art made from bits and pieces of the Earth. Back in Petaluma, with this new vision of the future motivating her forward, it took Cherney a while to find a storefront space she could afford, and to establish relationships with local designers.
She ended up buying a truck, which she turned into a mobile art gallery and jewelry store. The actual shop, wedged between a bar and a clothing store, came along later.
“I saw the space, and thought, ‘Yes, it is small, but hey, I know how to deal with a small space.’ I now think of the shop as my second truck - the one that doesn’t have wheels.”
Cherney still uses the truck at music concerts like the Kate Wolf Festival, and for various art and community events, fundraisers, and private parties.
Asked if she misses being a scientist, Cherney is quick to say she will always be a scientist.
“Oh, believe me, I use my geology every day,” she says. “I use it to hand-pick my stones. I use it to tell customers about the jewelry I sell. I think it’s nice for people to be able to come in here, and realize that when I talk about stones and rocks, I know what I’m talking about. I know where these rocks all came from, why they look the way they do, and how they got that way. You show me a rock, and I can tell you that rock’s story.”
She really can, and she frequently does.
“I often have children bring me rocks and ask me to identify them,” she says with a smile. “Some people who aren’t children, too. Adults will bring a rock into the shop also, and they’ll say, ‘So … what’s going on with this one?”
Asked what she does then, Cherney smiles again.
“Are you kidding?” she laughs. “I tell them.”
(Email David at david.templeton@arguscourier.com)
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