From an article in Taos News (Sept. 2015):
When Emily Benoist Ruffin looks around her goldsmith shop on Bent Street, she thinks of her grandfather.
“He would be proud,” says Ruffin. “I spent much of my early life in his workshop. He liked to build contraptions, a Rube Goldberg type who had both medical and engineering degrees. I grew up using tools, always making stuff.”
Understandably, Ruffin
’s own workshop at 119 Bent Street is also full of tools – from a large draw bench, to tiny tap and die sets, exotic headed hammers, ancient bezel blocks, soldering torches, minute delicate chisels and other old world tools. Tall cabinets with dozens of small drawers line the walls. Large loose-leaf binders stack up. Amid this controlled chaos, Ruffin can be found where she is most comfortable – at her bench, hunched over her next creation, peering in with tools in hand.
“I love making jewelry because as I sit quietly, with an entire tiny universe laid out in front of me, time ceases to exist,” says Ruffin, who has been constructing jewelry in Taos since 1980. In front of Ruffin’s workshop is the Emily Benoist Ruffin Design & Goldsmiths retail shop. Ruffin’s work is displayed along with more than a dozen other local and European Goldsmiths/Art jewelers. Ruffin’s signature piece is the Stripe Ring. Hand-constructed like most all her work, she calls it “one of my reputation makers.” It exemplifies the designerly, made-from-scratch, and laborious process that has propelled Ruffin to the forefront of the national and international hand-constructed jewelry making scene. Like most of her work, the construction of a Stripe Ring begins with a stone and a person. Ruffin gets an idea of a client’s tastes, personality and preferences and works to balance them with their body proportions: “I work from the dimensions of the stone and the person’s hand and fingers. From there, I can get the proportions that are right for that piece, the person and the personality.”
The Stripe Ring design bears one of seven registered trademarks that Ruffin has established and secured. Over the years, she has become a “jeweler’s jeweler,” a moniker that firmly stamps her place amongst the best in her profession. Further evidence of Ruffin’s world-class reputation lies among many awards on the display in the windows, including the prestigious Saul Bell International Award and the American Gem Trade Association’s Spectrum Award.
“For me, jewelry design is a combination of art and science,” she says. “I was always good in math and loved mechanics. It’s a form of small architecture or small sculpture for me.”
A daughter of a well-educated family full of artists, doctors and engineers in southern Mississippi, Ruffin gravitated to jewelry-making at an early age. She hand-constructed her first piece at age 14, got a boost from Helen Trivigno, prominent enamellist and art department head at her prep school, and earned a bachelor’s degree in sculpture in 1975 from what is now Rhodes College in Memphis. After flirting with following her father into medical school, she took a year off to work and travel in Europe. She ended up in Hermann Schafran’s studio in Pforzheim, the jewelry manufacturing capital of Germany. A renowned jewelry maker of the German tradition, Schafran recognized Ruffin’s innate talents and, rather than having her stay at Hochschule Pforzheim, (a renowned technical/engineering university there) put her to work in his shop/atelier.
“It was like meeting a brother for the first time,” Ruffin said. From Germany, she returned to her native New Orleans where she found work at a company doing fine antique jewelry repair and reproduction. Next, word of mouth got her to a fine jewelry company in Palm Springs, California that sought a German-trained hand goldsmith and designer where Ruffin said she truly cut her teeth and became a “bench goldsmith and model maker.”
Taos came calling in 1980. She bought into a log cabin on South Santa Fe Rd and opened the Coyote Restaurant and a small jewelry workshop next door across from the old Shamrock station, and began to settle. Taos just felt right for Ruffin. She moved her business to its current location on Bent St in 1983.
“Taos was a wonderful shelter for me,” Ruffin says. “It was full of honest folk with country values, like where I was from.”
At first she picked up “trade work” from other jewelers and custom work from previous clients. She traveled to Santa Fe for trade work, repair and custom work with jewelers in the capital city, and was introduced around to others in the business. In 1991, she expanded her Bent Street retail business by doubling its size and adding a showroom: “With hard work and saving money, I never borrowed money to open or operate my store. I was lucky. I think I’ve had angels watching out for me.”
Ruffin attributes her long-running success to an uncompromising dedication to her art and the legacy of sound design principals and fine European hand craftsmanship that underlie everything she does.
“It’s all about perfection and precision,” she says. “For me, it’s miniature engineering. I see the whole picture first, see what it’s going to look like when it’s done. Then I figure out the parts and build it.”
Emily Benoist Ruffin Goldsmiths
119 Bent St, Taos, NM 87571
(575) 758-1061
