BRNLY x Pruitt Collaboration: The SciPop Series

Earlier this month we hosted our good friend, Pat Pruitt, at our shop for a long-overdue collaboration. 

If you’re not already familiar with Pat’s work, he is a famous jeweler and sculptural artist from New Mexico whose technically complex and incredibly cool pieces are in some of the most important museum and private collections around the world #boss. His diverse body of work spans the fields of Native American Art, the EDC community, and the body jewelry industry.

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Luc and Pat met at Sine qua non, a body jewelry manufacturer in Albuquerque where Luc was working in the early 2000s. They became good friends and even did a couple of collaborations together over the years.

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In 2013, Pat met me (Maddie) at the prestigious Santa Fe Indian Art Market where I was doing exhibition research for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Pat thought he should introduce me to his knifemaker pal who lived in Albuquerque (enter Lucas), and the rest is history…

THE POINT BEING, we love Pat, and you should too. 

For this BRNLY x Pruitt collaboration, the idea was for Pat to use the Cypop as a canvas for his vision and signature style. The end result is a collection of 6 zirconium Cypops that we’re calling the SciPop Series. 

Pat is a talented machinist, and in order to achieve the SciPop’s 3D surfaces—sweeping lines, fierce angles, and subtle textures—he had to start with the time-consuming and complicated process of building a dedicated an indexable fixturing system for his CNC Machine. This fixture allowed him to work on the Cypops from all sides.

About the Cypops: 

Each Cypop from the SciPop Series started as a .375 Zirconium “Little Bear,” and was then machined by Pat, and finished by Lucas.

Each Cypop boasts BRNLY on the front side and Pruitt on the back. Although each Cypop started as a Zirconium Little Bear, they are all unique. 

2 Cypops highlight the nature of the raw material and the shape of the Cypop while bringing in the concept of Three Dimensional textures.

The next 2 Cypops blend some of Luc’s organic, hand-carved surfaces—a “Woodgrain” and “Jiggle” texture—with Pat’s 3D machined technical surfaces.

Finally, there is a special set of Cypops that share an identical surface pattern but are reversed in the sense that one Cypop surface is convex, and one is concave. This allows the Cypops to be nested—something we’ve never done before. These Cypops, in particular, fully represent Pat’s reimagination of the Cypop to express his signature style. We love the fact that these two can exist as pair or stand on their own.