Artist Statement/ About Me
Materialsmithing
I’m a teaching artist and my day-to-day practice is largely devoted to the creation of instructional artworks and other demo materials in techniques like drawing, painting and collage using 2D art materials like pastel, paint, ink and paper. Because of this, I draw most of the time and I am very thankful for that skill – an artistic gift that provides flexibility and ease of movement between concept-led and process-led 3D design when I make jewelry.
Having the ability to draw is an invaluable asset for all of my work, and I use it for both planning and preliminary model creation when making 3D work. Drawing and sketching in tandem with direct, intuitive response to raw materials is a thoroughly satisfying process.
Since 2009, I’ve called my working process Materialsmithing – a hybrid of Metalsmithing combined with Materials/techniques common to several other craft disciplines. I am happiest when I have created jewelry that passes beyond the traditionally expected gemstone and precious metal, though I also create works of that genre.
Materialsmithing is an ongoing search for feelings and ideas about how I might communicate what I see or sense in relationships between what lies before me. Combining disparate, cast-off or dismissed materials in new and unified ways is the most enjoyable part of my work process, and I strive to design objects with the ultimate goal of creating intriguing, well-constructed, lasting and wearable shapes and forms.
Both conceptual drawing/planning and the spontaneity of hands-on process/response to varied materials enables the jewelry objects I make to emerge and evolve as they will, though I cannot easily predict how each work day may progress. Either way, I am happy to work in whatever way the objects at hand lead me to go.
Metal and fiber are the most artistically appealing and visually rewarding of all the various raw materials at my disposal and I gravitate toward them enthusiastically and without reservation when creating jewelry works.
My artistic practice has always been about investigating and combining different and alternative materials and techniques in unexpected ways and creating jewelry objects is an enjoyable process of discovery, investigation, experimentation, evaluation and revision. Found and collected raw materials that I have contemplated over, often for quite some time, are a recurring feature in what I make. I enjoy revealing the unseen, unnoticed, unexpected or unknown and I am often happily surprised by what results.
Spending time with the materials I have gathered to patiently smith the equation of what they want to show me, what to make of them and how to fabricate a new and well-made place for those materials to exist within is a delight, and there is immense artistic satisfaction in finding the way to that solution.