Art jewelry symposium casts new mold of sorts
Contemporary art jewelry, like other contemporary art, has undergone a vast transformation, as art jewelers have begun to mix precious and nonprecious metals with industrial cast-off material, found objects, shells, seeds, beach glass, scraps of text, bones and any other material they can get their hands on.
Some art jewelers don't use metals at all as they continue to expand the definition of what constitutes jewelry. Art jewelry, in short, is decidedly not your mama's metals.
Metalsmiths, jewelers, collectors, teachers, students and anyone interested in seeing some really cool stuff are in for a treat, as the Seattle Metals Guild and Pratt Fine Arts Center present the ninth Northwest Jewelry/Metals Symposium, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.
The event features speakers of national and international renown, the sale of jewelry art books from around the world, and a silent auction of jewelry crafted by Seattle Metals Guild members. (For space availability at the symposium, e-mail: symposium@seattlemetalsguild.org.)
The Seattle Metals Guild Biennial Exhibition opens 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 8 at the International Meeting Place on Level 2 of the Washington State Convention & Trade Center. Both shows are free and open to the public.
Art jewelers Carmen Valdes and Joan Hammond, co-chairs of the symposium's planning committee, say they wanted to strike a balance among the speakers. "We look for artists working in large and small scale, artists who give slide presentations about their work, presenters who give a technical talk, and an historian, curator, or someone who can give a broader picture of the field," Valdes says.
They wanted local, national and international presenters, to give people a glimpse of what's going on in other parts of the country and the world. "There are so many artists in our area who are well known and doing good work; it's important to showcase that fact," Hammond says.
Masters of metal
Jeweler Norman Cherry will lecture on contemporary jewelry in the United Kingdom. He's a master of the metalsmith's art, known for using textile techniques to weave objects and jewelry out of color-coated copper, silver, gold and platinum. His recent pieces are iconic, shield-like forms that play with the idea of scale: each, though only three inches tall, appears monumental.
Speaker Robert Ebendorf was recently honored with a 40-year retrospective at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2005, he'll receive one of the Renwick's coveted "Masters of the Medium" awards, an honor bestowed every two years to only four artists in the country.
His success as a jeweler shows that contemporary art jewelry has little to do with the preciousness of the material. It is not surprising for him to mix metals with crab claws, a mummified squirrel's paw, rusty nails, or found plastic spoons.
Bay Area enamelist June Schwarcz and Skagit Valley sculptor Sheila Klein represent the nonjewelry aspect of the metalsmith's art. Octogenarian Schwarcz, one of the craft world's national living treasures, will talk about her 50-year career as an enamelist. She makes vessels and electroformed bowls, though these objects don't necessarily hold water or anything else but the light on their vitreous surfaces.
Klein's work occupies the space where sculpture and architecture meet theater. She has designed such diverse works as a 15-foot tall edifice of pants, giant earrings for the palm trees of West Hollywood and ornamentation for the control tower at Los Angeles International Airport. She's currently working on a leopard-spotted ceiling for the Houston Airport.
All of these artists work in metal, yet their unique approach and vision make it hard to believe they share a common material.
Neurologist Frank Wilson, author of the book, "The Hand," rounds out the roster with a lecture on the relationship of the evolution of the hand and human creative imagination.
Symposium's start
The idea for the symposium was hatched in the early 1990s by Mary Lee Hu, professor and chair of the metals department at the University of Washington; Karen Lorene, proprietor of Facere Jewelry Art Gallery; and local art jewelers Micki Lippe and Jane Martin.
"For years we had sponsored a symposium on antique jewelry and brought a keynote speaker from England," Lorene says. "Then we got the idea that we could use the same format with art jewelry. We invited makers, collectors, teachers, students and got them all in one place."
Hu had organized a similar event, which she called Northwest Craft Dialogues — financed with $400 in seed money from area art galleries and held in an auditorium on the UW campus. Lorene and Hu realized that they were trying to do the same thing. "There was a need for community," Hu says. "We all thought, 'We need to start something.' "
The symposium brought artists, teachers and students from many art programs in Washington, as well as Montana, Oregon, Alaska and British Columbia. The organizers had a feeling that people were hungry for this type of event, and they were right. The first symposium filled the auditorium.
The following year, Pratt Fine Arts Center began offering an intensive workshop with one of the visiting master artists, and the format for the current Northwest Jewelry/Metals Symposium was born.
Art jewelry versus fine jewelry
So what is this art jewelry, and how does it differ from the rows of diamond rings lining the cases of ordinary jewelry stores?
"It's work that's difficult technically, concerned with imagery and with finding a new approach to what's wearable," says Facere Gallery's Lorene.
"Art jewelry is where the hand of the maker is visible within the design. It's like the 'voice' that writers have." It's about communication, about how the artist and the wearer share a relationship and a similar sensibility. As Lorene puts it, "When I wear jewelry art it makes who I am more obvious to you."
Jeweler Carmen Valdes, whose works combine rubber and gold, has been on the receiving end of people's confusion about art jewelry, though she says that people are starting to get used to the new materials that jewelers are using. "When I started making jewelry 10 years ago, people would say, 'what's that black stuff?' Now they say, 'Oh wow, rubber.' "