Material Girls: Found Jewels

Natasha Caine, uses antiques to create jewelry

As a child in Russia, NATASHA ZHURAKOVSKAUAR (now CAINE) learned Victorian-era decorative crafts from her grandmother who learned them from her grandmother.

She carries the love of those crafts and antiquity with her.

Trained as a microbiologist, she left Russia twenty years ago, first working in New York and New Jersey before traveling to Wilmington to visit.

“I fell in love with North Carolina because it was wonderful weather even in February,” she says. When she didn’t find job opportunities in microbiology, she trained to be a paramedic and spent several years taking college courses. Then she began working for a custom jewelry maker.

“I saw how successful she was and how beautiful the work was and how happy it made her. She let me work with her broken pieces,” she says.

To their surprise and pleasure, Caine’s work was good.

“I realized I could make jewelry, and now I make my jewelry for the past twelve years,” she says. 

Her shop, which opened four years ago, is EMPIRE JEWELRY in the Old Wilmington City Market.

For the first three or four years, Caine made beaded jewelry, then she had the chance to go to Penland School of Crafts in the North Carolina mountains.

There she learned the lost-wax casting technique, which opened her way to creating any item she wanted out of any type of metal.

She began making bugs, and her distinctive style developed. Dragonflies, bumblebees, and spiders are created from her castings and augmented with found pieces of vintage jewelry and other antiquities. She works primarily with silver alloy but also uses brass and gold.

“One of my bugs is in the Museum of Art in Roanoke, (Virginia), which is not the biggest museum in the world, but I’m very proud to say they love it,” Caine says.

Customers collect her bumblebees, wearing them individually or combining them as graduated pendants on a chain. She also makes mechanical watches, statement pieces that resemble flowers from parts that are anything but, and each item is different from each other.

Until last year, when she developed breast cancer – “I’m doing very well now,” she says – Caine  took her unique pieces to more than three dozen shows a year. It built her client base and helped her to decide to open the shop.

She spends hours combing antique shops, flea markets, and elsewhere for vintage items.

“Vintage doesn’t exist – only in museums. When I came here, and I can go even to a flea market and find some kind of brooch for 25 cents, it’s shocking. So I started to collect.”

Each piece she buys is like buying a storybook, she says. The piece tells her a story, and she creates the work to illustrate it.

“Of course, I don’t know if it’s a real story, but it’s real,” she says. “It’s what I feel."

Click Here to read about mixed media artist Ally Favory.

Click Here to read about letterpress artist Emily Wismer.

Click here to see more photography by Jeff Janowski.