Jewelry was considered superfluous and ostentatious on the Israeli kibbutzim where Vered Kaminsky and Deganit Stern Schocken grew up.

To this day, Kaminsky still doesn't wear it. Stern Schocken started to only when she became head of the department of jewelry at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Israel.

While their upbringing complicates their relationship with jewelry, the two women have distinguished themselves in the field of creating it. They, along with Esther Knobel and Bianca Eshel-Gershuni, are featured in Women's Tales: Four Leading Israeli Jewelers at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

All except Eshel-Gershuni visited Houston recently to promote the show, which presents jewelry as art form rather than adornment.

Eshel-Gershuni combines precious and common materials that convey feelings of victimization resulting from lost love and war.

She was born in 1932 in Bulgaria and immigrated to Palestine in 1939. She studied at the Avni Institute of Fine Arts in Tel Aviv.

"Bianca's work is highly autobiographical," says exhibit co-curator Davira Taragin, director of exhibitions and programs at the Racine Museum of Art in Wisconsin. "It's about surviving in a war-torn country as an artist, a widow and a single mother. It's a means to vent her feelings about a series of ill-fated relationships, beginning with the death of her husband at age 27."

While working on a series of fish brooches during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Eshel-Gershuni could hear the air-raid sirens, and she was surprised to see her fish had morphed into combat planes, recalling the fate of her pilot husband, who died in Israel's Sinai Campaign of 1956.

My Grave Ring, made of precious and nonprecious materials, could be very morbid in its references to the vagaries of war and the inevitability of death, but it could also reference the joy of joining her husband in the afterlife.

Kaminsky tosses her jacket onto one of her stainless-steel Stacking Stools, unintentionally emphasizing the fact she believes her pieces work on many levels. You can sit on her stools, but "the reason of jewelry, the true function, is to mean something," she says.

Kaminsky, born in Kibbutz Revadim, Israel, in 1953, is a senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. She has a master's degree from the University of Paris.

She is motivated by curiosity and driven to do handwork. "My motivation is to play and translate abstract ideas through 3-D objects. For me, creating by hand is a way of thinking. I play with abstract forms, and sometimes they become jewelry or a basket or a bowl or a stool. The baskets are a piece of jewelry that became bigger.

"My work is geometric, minimalist, abstract. For me, it's always about metals and the discipline of goldsmithing, silversmithing."

She is also fascinated by patterns, and though she frequently works with silver, she likes to play with inexpensive materials, too.

She sometimes uses stones she finds on the street and sets them in precious metals, as in Necklace, of 18-karat gold and stones.

"Stones have so many meanings," she says, noting that Palestinian youths throw stones at Israeli soldiers and that houses in Jerusalem are made of stone.

"I work instinctively and see things later and realize the connections," Kaminsky says.

Knobel enjoys combining simple techniques, playful concepts and difficult issues. She is interested in the ambivalence such juxtapositions produce.

For her ongoing series Immigrants Brooches, for example, Knobel cut images of people, tigers and rabbits from Chinese tea boxes and balanced them on tiny wheels. These fanciful compositions are fun to look at but also allude to the plights of immigrants.

Pine Tree Needles, which she made of anodized aluminum in 1977, was a turning point for her, creatively. "As children, we made necklaces from pine needles. To be able to define this very early memory of a necklace into a piece of jewelry was the moment I knew I would be able to make jewelry and use it for self-expression," she says.

She was born in 1949 in Bielawa, Poland, and immigrated to Israel in 1951. She has a master's degree from the Royal College of London.

"The time I was educated was an interesting time in jewelry. The renaissance of new ideas," she says.

She employed scraps of silver and gold to create Daisy Wire, soldering flower shapes onto a wire that wraps around and around.

My Grandmother Is Knitting Too is about the memory of her family. "I made this a little bit after I lost my mother. Most of my family disappeared in the Holocaust. It's knitted in copper wire. It looks soft but is very hard and brittle."

Stern Schocken's architectural training is evident in all of her clean-lined work, some of which resembles maps or models of cities. But she says her childhood in a rural kibbutz also influences her in ways she's not always aware of.

After she made Two Pools, she visited Kibbutz Amir, where she was born in 1947, and realized the work reflects the view of the Jordan River through the trees.

She has a bachelor's degree from the Bezalel Academy in industrial design and architecture, and a master's degree from Middlesex University in London.

Stern Schocken toys with the idea of gemstones. The stone doesn't have to be in the center of the work or even in a fixed position, she says. And it doesn't have to be a stone at all, she concludes. It can be less permanent. It can be silk or water or paper.

She also has experimented with making the clasp and the mechanism of the jewelry the focal point. "My education came from finding how things are built. So I don't hide the clasp and the mechanism. I make it part of the aesthetic."

The series How Many Is One explores the process of casting and questions whether one version of a piece should be put on a pedestal to the exclusion of all other versions.

"All the mistakes that occur on the way are part of the art. The only thing that exists is the process. No piece is more important than the process or any other piece. You never have a finished piece.

"We are artists. We can't explain everything that happens."

eileenmcclelland@mac.com