Lynne Merchant, innovative wire artist since 1970, specializing in wire wrapping.

Lynne Merchant's
Visit to a Tahitian Pearl Farm

by Robert K. Liu

SHELLS OF ADULT AND JUVENILE PEARL OYSTERS, NECKLACE BY LYNNE MERCHANT, AND MABE, BAROQUE, ROUND AND KESHI PEARLS. Aside from being a source of pearls, the shells of Pinctada margaritifera are used for mother-of-pearl. Starting clockwise from the pearl and wire necklace: round black pearls (1.3-1.55 centimeters diameter); keshi pearls (0.7-1.45 centimeters long); baroque pearls (1.1-1.3 centimeters diameter); and mabe pearls still attached to the shell of the pearl oyster. Keshi result when the nucleus is rejected by the oyster. Traditionally, pearls are sized in millimeters and graded by shape and condition.

Imagine being in the South Seas while engaged in one of your favorite pursuits. Lynne Merchant was recently privileged to witness grafting and harvesting of the famed Tahitian black pearls on a pearl farm in Takaroa, located in the Tuamoto-Gambier Islands of French Polynesia. Some forty years ago, her mother had befriended a taxi driver in Tahiti; thereafter, he visited the family each year in California. Once he brought Merchant some Tahitian black pearls as a present. She wished for more to make a necklace, at which point he put her in touch with his relative, Eliane McCabe of Hawaii; six years later they are still friends. Last year McCabe and Merchant visited a pearl farm, through McCabe's friendship with Jean Pierre Champs, the chief or chef of Paul Yu's pearl farm, the largest of twenty-five such farms on the Takaroa atoll.

Merchant started working with Tahitian pearls before they became popular, acquiring them from McCabe. Now living in Leucadia, California, she trained at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland but left in her senior year for Canada, which started a travel path that took her to



	SILVER AND BLACK PEARL NECKLACE by Lynne Merchant, using coiled wire links, called Kuchi coils; beaded wire jump rings and coiled S-hook clasp. The pearl is wrapped with a Calder coil. The pendant is 3.8 centimeters long, including the loop. Lynne Merchant's pearl jewelry ranges in price from one hundred fifty to three thousand dollars.

dozens of countries. In some, she learned craft techniques that enabled her to make a living and generated her fascination with wirework, which she has taught for fourteen years, in the United States and abroad. While she works with many forms of jewelry, the combining of Tahitian pearls and silver wire have really struck a chord. Using her hands and only five simple but good tools, Merchant subscribes to the axiom of doing more with less. She has strengthened the art of wirework and evolved a style that is bold, functional and aesthetic, often touched with playfulness. Her wire showcases each pearl, but strives for an understatement, rather than overstatement. The cool neutrality of silver blends well with the black, gray, green, bronze and gold highlights of the pearls, especially appropriate in current preferences for black or neutral-colored clothing. Some of the pearls are almost white, which is more the color of South Sea pearls from Pinctada. maxima of Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines.



LYNNE MERCHANT'S TOOLS in a compact zippered pouch, with Lindstrom pliers and cutter, wire gauge, polishing cloth and 14/16 gauge sterling wire. Her custom-made hammer is the result of a collaboration between a wood-turner and a metalsmith, both also women. Merchant uses a steel bench block for light forging.

While Merchant's jewelry has a casual practicality, it is the product of disciplined thought and manual dexterity backed by longterm experience. Pearl farming has a parallel, as many think of it as a carefree way of obtaining wealth in South Seas paradises. It is anything but that, requiring hard work and risk in primitive conditions, balanced by the ability of the grafters to perform with surgical precision.

During Merchant and McCabe's stay in Takaroa, they observed the gathering of previously grafted pearl oysters, their harvesting, and also first and surgrafte or second grafting. The black-lipped oyster, Pinctada margaritifera, is widespread in tropical waters, and the species cultured in French Polynesia to produce Tahitian or black pearls. Being long-lived, up to thirty years, makes such oysters ideal for culturing pearls, since nacre deposition is only about one millimeter or less per year. Once numerous and gathered for food and its mother-of-pearl for buttons, it is now scarce enough to require cultivation.



DIVER AND ASSISTANTS WITH CHAPELET OF PEARL OYSTERS, in the workboat; these have been gathered from the lagoon for grafting.

Grafted, adult oysters are hung from floats or platforms in strings (chapelet) or in wire mesh cylinders (if there are predators present) some ten meters below the surface of the lagoon; these heavy strings of about twenty oysters each are brought to the workboat by divers and the chapelet carefully counted. Once landed, they are power-washed to clean the shells and are cut free from the nylon monofilament that

attaches them individually to the chapelet. The oysters are put into buckets and wedged; each grafter receives a basket of wedged oysters by the grafting station. The small work area has a supply of nuclei of various sizes, which are perfectly round balls ground from the shell of specific species of mussels from the Mississippi River and pieces of mantle epithelium from sacrificed donor oysters. (Although ground pearls may now serve as the nuclei in certain types of cultured Chinese freshwater pearls.) It is this tissue that forms a pearl sac and secretes nacre around the nuclei, to produce a cultured pearl.

With the first graft, the grafter puts a wedged oyster onto a spring-loaded shell holder, then carefully opens the bivalve shells with a dilator, while natural light illuminates the work area from



	Row of grafters, mainly men, sit in good natural light while performing the delicate process of inserting a graft into a pearl oyster.

behind him. His spatula pushes aside the oyster's body parts until the gonad or reproductive organ is visible. (There may be a relationship between the size and shape of the gonad and the resulting pearl.) A tiny incision is made in the downward extension of the gonad; an instrument with a cupped end carries the graft for insertion into this cut, with the exterior or nacre-secreting side of the epithelium facing upward.

An appropriately-sized nucleus is placed on top of the mantle tissue, the organs pushed back in place and the oyster closed. It is then placed in a water-filled container with the hinge at the top, so gravity will not push the nucleus out of the incision. The operation takes one to two minutes but continues at a steady pace throughout the day. About twenty-five to thirty-five grafts are done per hour. Careful records are kept of each grafter's performance or success rate with grafts, which range from twenty-five to forty percent, although Robert Wan states a rejection rate of forty percent, which means a higher rate of success. The ten or so grafters at Yu's farm, consisting of one woman and the rest men, all Chinese as opposed to a traditionally Japanese workforce, grafted some six thousand oysters during Merchant's visit. The owner's son is one of the grafters.



GRAFTING OPERATION, in which a previously wedged oyster is placed in a shell holder, while the - dilator is carefully ratcheted to open the shell not more than 1.0 centimeter. Here a yellow mussel nuclei is about to be inserted into a small incision made in the oyster's gonad, preceded by a piece of the donor mantle. At this farm, the grafters are Chinese.

Six hundred pearls were harvested, all of which were sold to Japan, currently still the largest customer for black pearls. In an established pearl farm, grafting appears to be on a monthly basis, although oysters grafted for the first time require two years of growth before harvesting. Regrafts may be harvested at shorter intervals. Like similar rules at diamond mines, those working on harvests cannot wear gloves, surf shoes or shorts with pockets, to discourage theft.

Harvesting is much like grafting, with essentially the same procedures. Once a pearl is detected through its transparent sac, an incision is made into it and light pressure is exerted to push out the pearl, which is cleaned, recorded and stored. If the oyster is considered healthy, it is regrafted or surgrafted. There can be up to three successive grafts, with larger nuclei (up to ten millimeters) used for the second and third. After the third, it can be used for



	GRAFTER CUTTING MANTLE from donor oyster; three millimeter-wide strips of the mantle are cut into 3x3 millimeter squares on the woodblock to be used for the grafts.

mabe production. If the oyster is at all unhealthy or has undeveloped gonads, it is either placed back into the lagoon for recovery or further growth or designated for eating, with the shell being sold to Korea for button-making.

Tahitian black pearls are now in vogue, usually worn in staid single or double strands, or with gold and diamonds. Natural black pearls were only discovered in the eighteenth century; now production of cultured pearls from French Polynesia has grown from one kilo in 1972 to eight tons two years ago, and is expected to continue to rise. One hopes that more jewelers will treat these bounties of the sea with the respect and honesty of Merchant's wirework jewelry. By highlighting their beauty singly or a few to a necklace with silver, she has democratized their availability.

PAUL YU PEARL FARM, TAKAROA, FRENCH POLYNESIA, as seen from the lagoon side of this atoll. All the buildings or fare are on stilts or pilings, with the grafters' fare to the right. Five archipelagoes comprise French Polynesia: Society (comprising the Windward and Leeward Islands), Tuamotu-Gambier, Marquesa and Austral Islands. Takaroa is in the largest of these island groups, Tuamotu- Gambier, and is about a two hour flight from Tahiti, in the adjacent Society Islands. Takaroa photographs by Lynne Merchant, studio photographs by Robert K. Liu/Ornament.

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