The most difficult question that people ask me at craft shows is “how long have you been doing this?”  If they mean “selling stuff at craft shows,” that’s easy- since 2006. If they mean “making stuff,” that’s a bit tricky…

Even though I didn’t start making jewelry to sell until 2007, jewelry and I go way, way back. I’ve pretty much always been fascinated by jewelry. Here’s a photo of me at the age of two (1979), wearing a necklace of white and green plastic beads. I have photos of myself wearing that same necklace dated as late as 1982, as well as other photos in which I am wearing other necklaces.  I remember making beaded necklaces in sixth grade to sell at a school fair, and in ninth grade rummaging around in my dad’s collection of odds and ends in the garage and making a necklace from various washers. I also had a big wire-wrapping phase and would make necklaces of marbles and various stones wrapped in wire.

To this day, I am rarely without a necklace and a bunch of big rings. Oddly, I always take them all off as soon as I get home. But if I go out without them I feel like I’m missing something. The moonstone on my left ring finger I got from a new-agey store on South St. I had been wanting a moonstone ring forever, just a weird thing that kept floating up in my mind. And the day I quit a job which wasn’t making me happy, I went out at my lunch hour and bought myself a moonstone ring. It’s sort of a reminder to myself of good things coming from making changes and taking risks.

The giant silver tree ring on my left index finger is my proudest jewelry accomplishment to date. I made it during a metalsmithing continuing education class at University of the Arts. Here’s a link to some in-progress photos.  It’s all one big piece of metal that wraps around. I’d really like to make more like this someday.

The thumb ring pretty much never comes off except when I’m doing flying trapeze. I just got it at a craft fair from a woman selling stuff she got at estate sales, so it’s nothing terribly interesting. It has a wavy line etched in the middle of it, which sometimes serves as a good reminder that life has its ups and downs and it all comes back around sooner or later.

The big ring on my right index finger is from nervoussystem on Etsy.  I love it because it was inspired by radiolarians and it’s the kind of thing I wish I had thought of making. It was 3D-printed, which is super cool too. The metals studio at Tyler had a 3D/CAD-CAM printer but I never got to use it since I only did one freshman class in metals (more on that later!)

And lastly, the right ring finger rings- the bottom one came from a craft show, and the other two are from sirenjewels on Etsy (I love her slogan “modern jewelry for the vintage soul.”).  I bought those as a 30th birthday present for myself.

Oh yeah, my nose ring. I got my nose pierced in the fall of 1996, a nice silver hoop, and have never taken it out. I guess nose rings are a bit passe, sort of like dying your hair purple (which I also did), but I still love my nose ring so it stays.  I’ve always left it in for job interviews, because I don’t want to work in the kind of place that has a problem with a minor non-ear piercing. Contrary to popular belief, it was not really some sort of act of art-school rebellion. I just saw a couple of girls around with nose rings and thought they looked beautiful, so I decided to get one. It may well have been one of the first kind of big things in my life that I did purely because I WANTED to, not because I had to or there was some good reason for it or it was necessary. So maybe it was a kind of rebellion. I don’t know. I got it done at Infinite on South St. I was on South St. with a few friends, and not a one of them even went with me into the piercing place. They all went to look around Armed & Dangerous while I was getting my nose pierced. So much for moral support. I guess I should have realized that was a bad omen about the future longevity of those friendships.

Anyway, in high school I took one metalsmithing class, since I liked making necklaces from beads and wire so much. I liked the class but I didn’t fall in love with it. I was frustrated by my slow, unsteady progress with sawing metal by hand. (I’ll have to see if I still have the pieces I made around somewhere!) Also high school class periods just aren’t enough time to really get into a project. When I went off to art school, I had it in my head already that I was going to be a painter, since that’s mostly what I focused on in my art classes and I enjoyed it (and I had some ridiculous notions about painting being “real art” and everything else being slightly suspect).

In freshman year you have to do a bunch of “foundation” courses in 2D and 3D design, and my second-semester 3D foundation course was in the metals studio. It wasn’t a jewelry class though, more like sculpture, which I had an especial prejudice against at the time. And I was totally flummoxed by the teacher’s insistence on having a “concept” before beginning work. This “concept” business would continue to be a HUGE issue for me during my entire art school career. At the time I thought it was because I was a shitty artist, but much later I realized that I just like playing with materials and developing a concept (or not) as part of the working process, rather than coming up with a concept first and then bringing it to life through the materials.  We did some metal casting which I thought was cool (I made a hideous sculpture with a fishbowl, wire, and cast metal leaves that were candle holders), and worked with some acrylic. I made a clock/lamp sculpture that’s kind of hard to explain and I don’t have photos of it unfortunately. There were etched poems on the base of it, and a blue lightbulb, and clear boxes that contained a shredded letter to a boy I had a crush on (cringe), and an analog alarm clock all wrapped up in a chain and suspended from the boxes. I didn’t wire the thing up right at first and it made a big bunch of scary electrical sparks the first time I plugged it in in my dorm room. It was all pretty awful. I really wish I had photos though! I liked incorporating a lot of words into my art at the time, and the professor asked me “why don’t you just go be a writer then?” which I took as a huge insult although in retrospect it was totally a valid question. Anyway, the whole thing probably unnecessarily soured me on the whole metals studio idea.

Sometimes I wonder how things would be different if I had majored in jewelry/metals instead of painting/printmaking…But here I am, finding my way into it,  in my own way, and I can really see myself starting to focus more on jewelry and less on painting…It’s gonna be interesting.

So, we’re doing a collaborative book exchange project. We’re each starting with a book, adding some drawing, painting, collage, whatever, to it, and then switching. Then we get to add stuff to each other’s images, and then switch back, and then we’re trading two more times so we each end up with each other’s book. Our styles are quite different (although there are some similarities perhaps- some colors? mixed-media-ness?), so it’s going to be a lot of fun to interact with each other’s work and see what evolves.

Marci came up with a theme for the project of “what I’ve been up to for the past 10 years.” It’s been interesting to actually sit and think about what has happened since graduating from art school in 1999. I never would have thought this ten years ago when I was FREAKING OUT about what the hell was I going to do with my life after graduating, but I’m actually really happy with how things have turned out.

I got my book already for the project. It’s a guidebook to Italy, which seemed right for a couple of reasons. Marci and I (and another friend, Liz, who I’ll add a link to when she gets her site up and running!) were roommates in Rome during spring semester of 1998. I’m the first to admit that I’m not a very good roommate, but we had some fun times, and the apartment we lived in was such a cool place. It was itty-bitty, but beautifully decorated, and it was on the top floor of the building and had this amazing terrace garden, and a ladder so you could climb up and sit on the roof, where there was an astounding view of San Pietro. I had to go and dig up a photo of it to prove how amazing it was- here’s me on the roof (good god I look fat but it’s just really baggy clothes, what was I thinking!) :

The second reason I wanted to use a book about Italy for this project is because the semester I spent there was really the first opportunity I got to explore making books, and I fell in love with it. I really think that semester was a huge turning point in my artistic development. I was a double major in Painting and Printmaking, but I never felt quite right doing just one or the other. I was always interested by the idea of mixing mediums, but that was (understandably) frowned upon- you were supposed to paint in Painting and make prints in Printmaking. But in Rome I took a class called “Sketchbook,” where we went to different places in Rome to draw. The professor (Gennell Miller- here’s a link to a recent show of hers, which is about all I could find online) encouraged us to do more than just basic drawing- she was really into making these crazy mixed-media collagey books herself, so we basically had free rein to do whatever. It was amazing. I also had a painting class that semester, and felt so horribly blocked, and bored, whenever I tried to paint the requisite large-scale oil paintings. But whenever I worked on my books all was right with the world and I’d stay in the studio for hours on end cutting and pasting. I accumulated a large box of ephemera and magazines and odds and ends, very much like how I still work now. I ended up with a huge pile of painted, collaged, etc. books by the end of the semester. (You can see some of them here: Lungotevere, Roma, Xray, Silver, Nuovo)

Last week I started tearing out pages from my book to make space for extra collaged things, and I spray-painted the cover gold. Of course looking at this guidebook made me feel super nostalgic for Italy. Is it possible to feel homesick for a place that was never your home, or only a very temporary one? I was only there for four months but it really got under my skin. I haven’t been back since then, and although I hope to get there someday I know it will be totally different, and probably vaguely disappointing. Because really nostalgia isn’t ever just about a place, it’s also about a very specific time and set of circumstances, and who you were and what you experience and think and feel, and you can’t ever go back to that or recreate it.

As the project progresses, I’m going to post in-progress shots, to document the evolution of the two books.