Emanuela Duca, a fine jewelry designer based in Hudson Valley, NY, was born in Rome, Italy. While pursuing her degree from the School of Art in Rome and the European Institute of Design, Ms. Duca was involved in dance, painting and sculpture. But it was in jewelry design that she finally found the medium she had been searching for: the marriage of movement and sculpture. Ms. Duca’s earth-bound, highly textured surfaces are evocative of volcanic ash and the ancient ruins of her native Rome.  But their shape and combination, true to her New York sensibility, are clean, simple and minimal. Sculpted in wax, then forged and constructed in sterling silver and 18k yellow gold, the individual forms are shaped and manipulated through various techniques mastered by the artist through many years of experimentation.  It’s a very physical process, one that allows Ms. Duca to put an exclamation point on her unique design language as she creates the kind of primitive, highly sophisticated forms that are always revealing themselves in fresh, unexpected ways and for which she has become so well known.