Armadillo Necklace

A row of overlapping silver plates forms the body of this necklace, each segment curved and banded so that the whole encircles the neck like the armored shell that gives the design its name. Héctor Aguilar built the piece from repeated units linked to flex against one another, so that a form suggesting rigidity moves and settles with the wearer. The reference to the armadillo is not decorative surface imagery. It is structural: the animal's segmented plating becomes a principle of construction, translated into articulated silver that curves and closes around the body.

The design depends on the relationship between mass and movement. Each plate carries enough silver to hold light across a broad, gently domed surface, and the banding that divides one segment from the next reads as both ornament and joint. Where a single sheet of metal would sit stiffly, the linked plates allow the necklace to follow the curve of the collarbone. Aguilar favored substantial, sculptural silver over applied stones in much of his jewelry, and here the metal supplies the entire effect: weight, reflective surface, and the rhythm of segment against segment. The absence of gemstones concentrates attention on how the plates are shaped and joined.

Aguilar directed the Taller Borda in Taxco, the workshop he built into one of the significant centers of the silver renaissance, and his hallmarked production spanned roughly 1939 to 1962. Morrill's study of his work records necklaces organized around solid silver drops and around Pre-Columbian beadwork, evidence of a designer who returned repeatedly to the problem of giving a necklace structural weight without sacrificing wearability. The armadillo design belongs to that line of thinking. It draws on a recognizably Mexican animal form rather than on European ornament, and it resolves that form through the workshop's command of linked, articulated silver. Taller Borda was recommended in travel guides through the 1940s and 1950s, and Aguilar's designs continued to circulate in books on Mexican silver after the workshop closed in 1962.

Within Aguilar's jewelry, the armadillo necklace shows how his workshop turned an observed natural structure into a wearable system of plates and links. It records a characteristic method of the Taller Borda, in which sculptural mass and mechanical articulation were made to serve each other, and it demonstrates how a Mexican designer sourced his forms from the animals and craft traditions around him rather than from imported models.