November 2018 – Glass & Lead

Curiosity

Uncategorized

1”x1”, glass, ceramic and antique wallpaper

A few weeks ago, a friend stopped by with a whole truckload of antique mosaic tiles and told me their story. He’d rescued them from a warehouse that his family’s business is about to sell. They’re from Italy, and must have come from a project 50 or 60 years ago. Near them in the warehouse are marble statues of saints that no one can quite explain. A whole box of the tiles are curved corner tiles. Turned upside-down they look like little books. This pendant combines the tiles that arrived dusty and worn from the warehouse with pieces of wallpaper that was buried two layers below the surface in our house when we bought it to make a tiny book of stories. The stories aren’t easy to read, but they make me curious.

Authenticity

health pendants

2”x1”, found objects

This pendant definitely bends the rules as far as what counts as mosaic, but since I made the rules for this project, I can bend them. I’ve been trying for weeks to mosaic the image of a peacock feather, and it’s been super hard. At the small scale of a pendant, none of them came out even resembling a feather. So, frustrated, I decided to just use a real peacock feather. And, lo and behold, it’s more beautiful than anything that I could have done to copy it. And, by happy coincidence, I get to post a pendant of a turkey feather on Thanksgiving!

Sunshine

health pendants

2”x.25″, mirrored glass

The gray days are getting more intense, and every year at this time I wonder why anyone chooses to live in New England. I long for sunshine, and I’m not convinced that the special light therapy lamp I have in the living room will help as much as a dose of actual sunshine. This pendant repurposes mirrored golden glass into a sunny, light-bouncing necklace.

The Power of Rama and Sita

health pendants

1”x1.5”, ceramic

What caught my eye about the plate that turned into this pendant was its small size, the sophistication of its edges, and its antiqued shine. Before I could break it and make it into something new and shiny my 4 year-old pinned a “note” to it that said I couldn’t break it because it was made in the woods by Rama and Sita during their exile. The good news is that some version of the story of Diwali is sinking in for him, and that the plate does indeed have a special pull to it. I broke a second plate, keeping the one he had connected to Rama and Sita intact. This pendant is a nod to the beauty that comes with retelling stories through the generations and the dignity that objects can absorb from the history we ascribe to them.

Privacy

health pendants

1”x1”, vitreous glass tile

I’ve been thinking about how much privacy matters, and how it can be comforting to know that something will be kept confidential, but also about how being closed off can make it hard to deepen relationships. As I made this pendant with dark strips of glass that suggested bars obscuring a view, I wanted to make the bars irregular, allowing small glimpses between them. What emerged looked a lot like tree bark, the tree’s way of protecting itself.