Monthly Archives: December 2018

1”x2”, found objects

It’s been amazing to watch my friends’ children turn into people with real personalities, interests, and goals.  As they grow I can start to see which parts of them are passed down from their parents, and which parts are all their own. When I think about my own greats and great-greats I don’t know exactly what’s been passed down to me, but I have some objects that give me a sense of who they were. This pendant is made from the tag that was attached to a pair of leather gloves that were bought (and never worn) by my great-grandmother.  They made their way to me, but don’t fit on my hands.  Clearly I didn’t inherit her bone structure, but maybe I have other parts of her hidden inside.

1.5” diameter, glass, found objects

Racism and sexism keep people from even being exposed to fields that might interest them, jobs that might offer better pay and educational paths that could lead in new directions. This pendant explores what it would look like if there were equal opportunity and equal exposure.  The gear at the center is like a merry-go-round that turns, letting people on and off at different stops along the way.  There’s some randomness in the system, but if the people on the merry-go-round are diverse, and they all have a chance to get off at any stop, then we’ll move closer to the diversity of the crowd that forms a border.

$45

1”x1.5”, ceramic, glass, found objects

Today, as I move through a milestone birthday, it’s clear that aging can happen with fear, with wistfulness, or with grace. I suppose there’s always a mixture of the three, but I hope grace can take the lead.  I chose the pieces in this pendant to match my own colors. The brown of my hair, now mixed with gray and silver, the purple that still peeks through, and the bits and baubles that I have to use to fix the parts of me that break now and then. All of these pieces, each one unique and imperfect, are set in an adhesive that I mixed to the color of my skin.

$45

1”x1”, glass beads

I spent some time thinking about how best to represent joy, jumping immediately to bold colors and moving away from the calm blues and greens that I’m always drawn to. But what shapes represent joy? Joy spreads, joy spills, joy radiates, but joy certainly isn’t carefully placed and contained, so when it came time to actually make the pendant, what felt right was to spill the colorful beads and let them land as they wished, frozen in the unplanned shapes and bold color combinations that they happened to form.  After working on other pendants for hours with tweezers to turn individual beads on their sides to hide their holes it was liberating and joyful to leave each piece as it landed.