I am excited to be heading for the Eastern Carolina University Material Topics Symposium today! I was invited to be a speaker and am really looking forward to the experience. Many esteemed peers are expected to be in attendance and among them plenty of friends to catch up with. I will be speaking on the subject of jewelry and its relation to Place, both historically and contemporarily with a few of my own pieces thrown in.
I was awarded a solo exhibition at the Sheetz Gallery of the Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts at Penn State, Altoona. The exhibition is free and open to the public and will run January 15 - March 15. A reception will be held 3-5 p.m. January 15 in the Titelman Study of the Center.
The pieces in the exhibition utilize disparate forms of metalworking in order to create metaphors for intra- and inter-personal relationships. The exhibition consists of a mixture of small sculptural pedestal pieces, wearable objects and framed drawings executed in vitreous enamels. These pieces address a variety of relationships including those of the contemporary constructed body to industry, the alchemy of interpersonal relationships and those of the individual to one’s core beliefs. They represent a collection of metaphors in metal.
I was invited to participate as a regional expert in the Goldsmithing & Silversmithing categories at "Answers.com"
You can see my profile and answers to some public members' questions here.
I will be giving a talk on the methods and materials used in ancient Peruvian metalworking at the Irving Arts Center on November 2nd at 2pm. The talk is free and open to the public. In addition to explainging how they acquired and used various metals, I will also give short demonstrations on some of the techniques using more contemporary equipment. Even if you don't get a chance to see the talk, I highly reccommend the exhibition which was organized in conjunction with the National Geographic Museum. Its an outstanding collection of work. It will be up until the end of the year. For more information, visit the Irving Arts Center Website.
I am pleased to announce that "Attic Turbine" (shoulder broach) won a juror's award at CraftTexas this year. CraftTexas is a biennial, juried exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
CraftTexas 2014 was juried by Carol Sauvion, the visionary behind the PBS TV series, Craft in America, and HCCC Texas Masters, Piero Fenci, Ceramics Department Head, Stephen F. Austin State University, and Clint Willour, Curator of the Galveston Arts Center. The jurors were tasked with selecting the finest works from a pool of 176 applicants and 477 pieces.
The exhibition is up through December 24th. If you find yourself in Houston, I hope you will have a chance to go by and see it.
Plumb Bob: Shelter and Plumb Bob: Loving and Faithful were both accepted into Soulcology: An Exhibition in Metal at the Guilford Art Center in Guilford, Connecticut. It is a national, juried exhibition and will be on view from June 6 through July 27th, 2014. It was organized by Lanette Barber and adjudicated by Robert Dancik. I am additionally pleased to announce that Shelter received the third place award! Both pieces are part of a series of plumb bobs that either hang from forged wall hooks or may be worn as necklaces.
The following is the statement which pertains to these pieces:
Plumb bobs have been used to find “true” vertical lines as well as depth. These plumb bob pendant necklaces come from the understanding that hard decisions must sometimes be made and those things upon which we base our decisions are reflections of what we value. “Shelter” references the idea of a secure home as a concern around which major life decisions may be built. It is not difficult to see great significance in the ability to access a dependable shelter, and the gold key is an exact duplicate of the back door key to my first house. “Loving and Faithful” is about a commitment to another in a partnership as a foundation for decision making. My husband and I were married according to the traditions of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and our vows were to be “with divine assistance, loving and faithful” unto each other.
Plumb Bob: Shelter (detail)
I was so excited when I received the letter inviting me to be the juror for the next Materials Hard and Soft Exhibition at the Greater Denton Arts Council! For those who are not aware, this is a National Contemporary Craft Competition and Exhibition that has been running strong for twenty-seven years. Past jurors have included such luminaries as Brent Kington, Mary Lee Hu, Paul J. Smith, Arline Fisch, Kenneth Trapp, Michael Monroe, Lloyd Herman, Marylin da Silva and the incomparable Harlan Butt. I am honored to be named among them and SOOOOO excited to see the applications! You can find more information and the prospectus here.
I was fortunate to receive an invitation to participate in the exhibition "Considering the Kylix: Contemporary Interpretations of a Classical Form." The exhibition is curated by Maleyne Syracuse at Peter's Valley School of Craft. Scan the QR code above or click the image to visit a page with more information about the exhibition and the piece including videos of the design and creation processes.
Considering the Kylix: Contemporary Interpretations of Classical Form
April 12-May 18, 2014
Opening Reception Saturday, April 12 from 5-7pm
Curator's Talk at 5:30pm
Attic Turbine Vent is currently on display at the Wayne Art Center's annual, nineteenth international juried craft exhibition, Craftforms. The juror this year was Lena Vigna, Curator of Exhibitions at the Racine Art Museum in Racine, Wisconsin. Information, including an online and downloadable catalog, may be found here. The exhibition runs from December 6 - January 25, 2014.
One of my enameled panels is hanging in Kansas tonight. "Alchemical Utensils" was selected by juror Sarah Perkins for inclusion in the annual Topeka Competition in the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library. It is an outstanding annual competitive craft exhibition at the Alice C. Sabatini Art Gallery. I am particularly gratified and awed at having something I did in enamels selected by such a world class enamelist. The exhibition runs from December 6th through January 19th. The opening reception will be from 5:30 - 8:30 on the 6th of December.
Three of my works will be included in this group exhibition. It is an "investigation into the work of metal artists / jewelers using organic form and natural based imagery in the development of their work." Curated by John Ready, director of the University Art Gallery at University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, the exhibition opens on Friday September 20th from 4-6pm and continues through the 12th of October.
Participating artists:
Yuyen Chang, Madison, WI
Sharon Church, Philadelphia, PA
Daniel DiCaprio, Richmond, VA
Catherine Grisez, Seattle, WA
David Huang, Denver, CO
Evan Larson, Detroit, MI
Ana Lopez, Fort Worth, TX
Volume 33 number 3 of Metalsmith magazine just arrived in my mailbox. It contains an article I wrote on the history of women blacksmiths in America, "Forging On." I am grateful to the following people for their help with the project:
Maria Cristalli, Maegan Crowley, Lisa Elias, Roberta Elliot, April Franklin, Mindy Gardner, Lisa Geersten, Alice James, Shawn Lovell, Corrina Sephora Mensoff, Rachel Miller, Darryl Nelson, Lorelei Sims, Dorothy Stiegler, Marsha Trattner, Jill Turman, Andrea Lisch of the Northwest Blacksmithing Association, JoAnn Bentley at ABANA, and Stacy Cantrell for her image research.
Volume 33 number 3 of Metalsmith magazine just arrived in my mailbox. It contains an article I wrote on the history of women blacksmiths in America, "Forging On." I am grateful to the following people for their help with the project:
Maria Cristalli, Maegan Crowley, Lisa Elias, Roberta Elliot, April Franklin, Mindy Gardner, Lisa Geersten, Alice James, Shawn Lovell, Corrina Sephora Mensoff, Rachel Miller, Darryl Nelson, Lorelei Sims, Dorothy Stiegler, Marsha Trattner, Jill Turman, Andrea Lisch of the Northwest Blacksmithing Association, JoAnn Bentley at ABANA, and Stacy Cantrell for her image research.
I am pleased to announce that my piece, Attic Turbine Vent (shoulder brooch) was selected as one of ten pieces in this year's exhibition for a Juror's Award. Materials Hard & Soft is a competitive, national exhibition now in its twenty-sixth year. This year's juror was Jean W. McLaughlin, Executive Director of the Penland School of Craft. 568 pieces were submitted and 71 chosen for inclusion with 10 juror's awards given. I am also pleased to say that a number of other UNT faculty, students and alumni were also chosen for inclusion resulting in very strong North Texas representation.
Excerpt:
Goal
This article is about how a non-enamelist came to design and build (and fail and build and fail and build and then build again) a large, torch-fired enameling kiln. First I would like to add a point of clarification: this is about building a torch-fired enameling kiln, not about torch-firing enamels. This is to say that I was attempting to create a kiln environment heated by a torch in which to fuse enamels to metals without the torch flame making direct contact with the object being fired. Although a metallic surround is sometimes used to help manage and contain the heat during a torch firing, most torch-firing of enamels involve applying the torch flame directly to the surface of the metal being enameled. As Deborah Lozier points out, this will cause some discoloration at the point of contact and size limitations depend on torch size.
What I was after was a kind of alternative enameling kiln design that might be useful in less equipped (or even portable) workshops such as a summer camp, but that might also enable more practiced enamelists to fire larger works than their current electrical kiln might accommodate. This article makes good companion reading to the technical article that immediately preceded it, regarding tig welding with enamels.
Kiln 1
My initial design was based on the beehive ceramic kiln form. Cylindrical and topped with a dome, this was constructed of #23 soft firebricks with kiln cement mortar and featured a vertical aperture by which the progress of the firing might be viewed. A raised internal turntable was constructed to enable rotation of the work and to provide an offset mesh surface onto which larger pieces might be affixed for increased stability. It was an impressive construction and an utter disaster. No amount of indirect firing with an oxy-acetylene torch would coax the enamel into fusing - the interior appeared to be too vast. We even tried bricking up most of the vertical aperture, but to no avail.
Test piece: sewn 6” copper foil cube, white liquid base coat enamel BC 1070 from Thompson, applied with an airbrush
Torch: Oxyacetylene with rosebud tip
Result: Time-consuming debacle
Kiln 2
Deciding that we needed to set our sights lower in terms of scale (and running low on mortar) we next decided to fit the interior of a small steel trash can with a lining of fire bricks. A soldering board was cut to fit within the lid interior. We learned the hard and smoky way that the steel can needed to be sandblasted or sanded prior to firing in order to remove surface coatings that did not approve of fire. Despite the closely mitered bricks, the heat of the torch did not travel well around the interior and enamel vitrification was only achieved on the corner nearest to the torch portal. Sigh.
Test piece: sewn 4” copper foil cube, white liquid base coat enamel BC 1070 from Thompson, applied with an airbrush. Test piece was suspended from a hole in the lid and thus rotated
Torch: Oxyacetylene with rosebud tip
Result: Disappointing failure
[For the exciting conclusion, including a design that worked, see the SNAG website: http://www.snagmetalsmith.org/2013/01/technical-article/]
I am pleased to announce that a technical article I wrote for the Society of North American Goldsmiths has been published to their website: http://www.snagmetalsmith.org/2013/01/technical-article/
The article summarizes the research I undertook to develop a large-scale, torch-fired enameling kiln. You will need to be a member to view it in its entirety, but I have made an excerpt available on my writing page. Thanks are due to Melissa Grady and Jeff McClung for their help with the research. Construction materials for Kilns 1-3 and all of the consumable materials were provided through the generous support of a University of North Texas Small Grant and the Studio Department of our College of Visual Arts and Design.
This was the final city to be visited for this stage of the You Are (the) Here project. Although I had been to London on two previous occasions, I reasoned that a significant enough period of time had elapsed for me to be able to see the city afresh. However, there was still a familiarity due to similarities of language and culture that rendered much of London less remarkable than the previous three cities by comparison. This is not to say that I did not thoroughly enjoy myself or see a great many new and magnificent objects of metalsmithing and other decorative arts. But after having lived in New York City a few times, London could not help but feel the most familiar of the four locations in this project. And I cannot be insensible to the fact that such a familiarity might have brought a certain amount of blindness to my surroundings. When one is surrounded by the strange and novel, I believe one notices more. However something of the pattern established by the first three cities probably also guided my observations, as you will notice that I found another bollard that I like. As for museums, I spent more than ten hours at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has stolen the title of “My Favorite Museum” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Crown Jewels, Design Museum, and British Museum were also delightful but could not hold a candle to the V&A. The following objects are likely to become the representations of London for this project, with the cylindrical, ceramic chimneys being the main representational object. I like the subtle reference to the British ceramic industry and found the variety of shapes delightful. As for the wall images, I was responding to the variety of sizes and textures in their composition and their testimony to the layers of history that abound in the city.
Attic Turbine Vent (shoulder broach) has been selected by juror Jean W. McLaughlin, executive director of the Penland School of Crafts, for inclusion in the 26th annual Materials Hard & Soft Exhibition at the Greater Denton Art Council in Denton, Texas.
Opening reception: February 8th, 2013, 6-8pm
Exhibition closes: April 5th, 2013
System has been selected by juror Gwynne Rukenbrod, Executive Director of Handmade in America, for inclusion in the Fine Contemporary Craft Exhibition at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Opening reception: December 7th, 6-10pm
Exhibition closes: January 12, 2013
I just sent off this piece to The Dumbarton House museum. I am extremely pleased with how it turned out. As I mentioned in a previous posting, it is based on a linen and Point de Gaze needle lace handkerchief in their collection.
sterling silver, fine silver, mother of pearl