My jade plant casts this shadow across the living room floor every morning. My jade plant is a great artist.
My jade plant casts this shadow across the living room floor every morning. My jade plant is a great artist.
I’ve been in the studio into the wee hours for the past several nights crafting these new pieces for the Monterey Metal Arts Guild annual show at Many Hands Gallery in Capitola, CA. Before I even made it to the studio, though, I spent lots of hours planning and doubting and planning. To be honest, what I ended up making is very similar to the vision that initially flashed in my mind when I started thinking about what to make for this show. But I wanted to challenge myself, to do something “new,” and so immediately after thinking of this idea, I started dismantling it. I didn’t think it was conceptual enough, and I wanted to make something that wasn’t only beautiful. I wanted to make something smart.
Bee necklace in sterling silver, gouache, and paper, with a vintage watch crystal
I was quite sick last week, and dealing with some intense sadness, and I spent a lot of time lying on the couch sketching. I became quite consumed by the process of planning this piece, which helped take my mind off of feeling bad. (I’m glad I had a deadline to encourage me to start, because I didn’t really want to do ANYTHING at first, but once I started working, I discovered that it was good for me.) I put out a little folding table next to the couch and sat and painted. I made several small paintings that were much smarter than the original bee design, but also somehow less interesting.
Every time I start to make something, I wage a battle with myself–making is always a process of generating ideas and then resisting them mightily. The Yes part of my mind says good, that’s good, go ahead and the No part of my mind says try harder, do better, be smarter. I think I need them both; they each do good in their own way. If either went away, I would be lost. And the battle between them shapes my process of making. They’re always murmuring, and I have to decide who to listen to moment by moment.
In the case of this necklace and earrings, Yes won when I decided to go ahead with my first thought of the bee instead of the more conceptual designs. No won when I decided to nix the original magnifying dome I was planning the piece around in favor of a vintage watch crystal to set over the painting. Because the watch crystal was much bigger then the original glass dome, I had to alter the painting, which was originally just the bee and the vine–too small to fill the watch crystal. So I added the ants, which I’m glad to have been made to do–I like the piece better with them. The setting and the chain were shaped by many other tensions between Yes and No, and yet somehow in the end, after all of that decision making I had to do, the finished piece is very much like what I first imagined and drew. Every piece I make ends up surprising me in some way, and the fact that the finished piece is quite like my original vision is actually what’s most surprising to me about this piece. Perhaps I’m surprised by this because No usually wins more. I think in the making of this necklace, Yes won more than No, which is probably what I needed in the midst of a really hard week.
Despite my initial criticisms of the design, I’m quite pleased with the final result. It reminds me of something that I had kind of forgotten–that I very greatly value simple observation of nature. That’s what this piece is to me. It doesn’t have to be conceptual; its value comes from the fact that it simply reflects the process of my looking closely. Allowing myself more Yesses than Nos for the making of this piece lead me to remember that about myself. I can feel that realization shaping my next project.
My maker's mark
The earrings, front view
The earrings, back view. A secret for the wearer.
Today is the one-hundred-and-sixty-first birthday of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and I couldn’t be happier about celebrating that fact. The book is at least in part about obsession and about searching for something elusive. As an artist, I identify deeply with the book because of those themes. Most artists have their obsessions, the ideas that they return to over and over again, the thing that they say in a hundred different ways. So in some way, the book strikes me as being about art, and artists, and making art. Even more specifically, though, I identify with Ahab’s particular obsession. One of my artistic obsessions, especially in my poetry, has something to do with searching for things that exist but can’t be seen. Ahab’s obsession was quite similar: Moby Dick, one could argue, is a symbol of exactly that.
Not only do the themes of the book captivate me, but it appears that I have somewhat of an obsession with the white whale himself, too. In fact, for our honeymoon, Jon and I packed our copies of Moby Dick and went to Martha’s Vineyard (close enough to Nantucket!). We rode our bikes around the island, sat on the beaches, and kept company with Ishmael, Ahab, Queequeg, and the rest. When I learned how to make jewelry, one of the first things I made was the Moby Dick copper cuff bracelet below, because I have this feeling of wanting to HAVE Moby Dick, to own him somehow, along with all the book represents. (Uh-oh–this is how it started for Ahab.) Since then, I have continued to pay tribute to the white whale. Jewelry, to me, is about keeping reminders of what matters to you close to your body. I wear my Moby Dick ring every day.
You can find these pieces in my shop.
I’m thrilled to be a nominee for one of the Martha Stewart’s American Made Awards. Check out my profile here.
If I make it to the finals, I’ll ask you to vote for me!
I love them. I love their unfurling.
My friend Megan’s mom is a florist. Megan told me that when her mom makes an arrangement, she doesn’t just include the fresh open flowers and the new buds, she also includes some that are dying. She wants to convey something about the whole life of the plant. I loved learning that.
I put these ranunculus on my kitchen table, and wanted fiercely to keep them there forever. I kept them there even as they dropped their petals and wilted and died.
I took these when the flowers were at their very end, though you can’t really tell that from the photos. Their heads were flopping over. For some photos, I pinched a flower’s neck and held its head up, then let it drop again after I had the shot.
When I was taking the photos, I felt a little bad for trying too hard to hold on to something so ephemeral as a flower. But now I feel glad to have given my attention to them when they were moving beyond beauty.
by Mary Oliver
I lift the small brown mouse
out of the path and hold him.
He has no more to say,
no lilt of feet to run on.
He’s cold, still soft, but idle.
As though he were a stone
I launch him from my hand;
his body falls away
into the shadowed wood
where the crackling leaves rain down,
where the year is mostly over.
“Poor creature,” I might say,
but what’s the use of that.
The clock in him is broken.
And as for ceremony,
already the leaves have swirled
over, the wind has spoken.
-from New and Selected Poems, 1992
My friend Lisa sent me an email entitled “something I thought you would like.”
She was very right. I like it. I like it a lot.
It’s called the “Red Thread Journal Dress.” As you could guess from the title, the maker, Ruth Rae, has sewed her private journal entries all over the surface of the dress.
I like that it brings writing and visual art together in a purposeful way.
I like the beautiful obsessiveness of it. She even sewed writing–her bigger secrets–inside of the pockets and inside the dress.
The museum in town is doing an exhibit of the things people collect–things like toasters, Mylar balloons, burned things, bottle caps, toothpastes from around the world–all on display.
There’s a kind of power to even the most mundane objects when displayed in great numbers. Why is that? I’m not quite sure.
It seems to me like they claim a voice in a way–refuse to be ignored. Or maybe it’s just that the human brain is drawn to repetition with variation–a hundred things of a kind lined up, all slightly different. They call out to the part of us that likes to make categories. In a way, I do feel like I could learn the nature of a thing more deeply by seeing it in a collection of similar things–like seeing all of the earthly examples of one of Plato’s ideal Forms.
This was my favorite collection ( not surprisingly, I guess), belonging to a veterinarian.
I wish I’d had my real camera with me–I admire this collection. I think I might have started a little one of my own, without entirely realizing it. Whenever I find a bone that’s been scoured bare and sun bleached, I take it home and count myself lucky to have found a treasure. A friend recently found a deer skull in the woods, pure white, and gave it to me as a gift–a very generous one. I find these weathered remains truly lovely. But also, I think part of me feels a dare to love the parts of nature that aren’t entirely friendly.
I recently bought a print of a turkey vulture circling above, made by my friend Julia Lucey. I chose it amongst all of her other wonderful prints because I liked that she chose to spend time making art about a creature that many don’t see beauty in, that people even find repulsive. I thought it was brave of her. And the print is beautiful.
This weekend, the Monterey Bay Metal Arts Guild (which I am a member of–in fact, I’m the publicity chair!) participated in an event at Santa Cruz’s Museum of Art and History called “Experience Metals.” We did demos of various metal techniques, including casting, stamping, smithing, etc. I volunteered at the event all weekend, and this afternoon got to try something I hadn’t done before: fold forming.
The technique entails hammering a folded sheet of metal in specific ways, then unfolding the sheet to create organic, three-dimensional forms. (Please excuse the poor picture quality–I took these with my phone.)
This is what the metal looks like before any hammering.
Here it is after a little bit of hammering, just along one side. The metalsmith uses a cross-pein hammer, which stretches the metal with each blow. You can see how the metal is beginning to curve as a result.
This is the piece I was working on, after hammering and rehammering and hammering some more, all along one side. Isn’t it amazing how much the shape has changed? Copper is shockingly malleable.
You can keep going on, hammering and hammering as the piece curves and curves some more, but I was excited to open mine up! Christmas! I annealed the copper by heating it to red hot with a torch, quenched it in water, then used an oyster opener to “crack” it open.
Here’s my metals teacher, Dawn, demonstrating how.
Isn’t it beautiful? It kind of makes me think of a catalpa pod.
Here are some more pieces made by students from Cabrillo College.
And the piece de resistance…
I couldn’t help myself; I had to put it on. I know it looks like the photo is washed out, but it’s really that the crown gave me a halo.
