Iced-Tea Spoon

A leaf, chased with veining and set at the end of a long, slender stem: the whole conceit of this iced-tea spoon rests on that single naturalistic gesture. Made for the tall glass, its attenuated handle reaching well past the rim, it shows how Héctor Aguilar's Taller Borda carried a coherent design sensibility from bracelets and brooches down to the smallest implements of the table. Flatware of this kind rounds out the picture of the workshop as a full-service silversmithy, not a jewelry house alone.

The bowl is formed as a stylized leaf, its surface worked with linear vein ornament that gives the polished silver a play of light and shadow, while the plain tapering stem keeps the composition uncluttered. That balance of a decorated terminal against a reticent shaft is characteristic of the Taller Borda's tablewares, which Penny Morrill's Silver Masters of Mexico documents across a range of spoons, from openwork baby spoons of the early 1940s to rope-design demitasse spoons of the following decade.

The piece also touches on a practical truth of the trade that Morrill records: Taxco in this period was above all a jewelry town, and much of its holloware and stamped tablework was executed in Mexico City, where Aguilar had pieces produced to his specifications in workshops equipped with machinery the Taller Borda lacked. An iced-tea spoon such as this one, requiring a long drawn stem and a die-formed bowl, sits within that collaborative economy, designed in Taxco and realized to the standard Aguilar demanded across his production from 1939 to 1962.