Monthly Archives: March 2020

1″ x 2″, found objects

At the center of this pendant is the stone from an antique hatpin that belonged to my grandmother’s cousin, and then to her daughter, Sharon. I was recently given a whole collection of her antique hatpins, and I hope to turn them into beautiful and contemporary art.  But I found that everything in keeping with the hatpin looked stylish in the same old-fashioned way, so I’ll consider this a practical transformation (since we don’t use hatpins very much these days), not a modernization. I’m honored to have the opportunity to use the pins, and equally challenged by the difficulty of making something that can capture the memory and the spunk of the wonderful women who owned them before me.  Maybe the next one will be spunkier.  

1/2″ x 2″, found objects

As we try to follow the advice to stay 6 feet apart from each other I keep remembering an exhibit that I loved at the Museum of Science when I was young.  It showed the size of the “personal space” that different cultures expected, and had circles drawn on the ground to represent the personal space from many different countries.  You could stand in the center of one and see how far apart people in England stand compared to people in Mexico or China.  Having lived in two different countries by then it made a lot of sense to me, and having moved around the world a lot since then I always think of it when people squish together on public bus seats or try very hard not to let their hand touch someone else’s elbow during rush hour.  This pendant is a visualization of the rings of space that we each have around us.  At the same time that it feels isolating, I’m trying to find what’s beautiful in defining our own personal space.

1″ x 2″, found objects

The beautiful thing about glass is that it looks so different in different lights.  This pendant is made from glass shards from broken bottles that I found along the Charles River.  They’ve been scuffed by shoes, buried in mud, and lost most of their glimmer, but in the sunshine they still catch the light.  Set in the black adhesive of the pendant they’re dull again, but tiny glass beads reflect the light even indoors, mimicking the tiny glimmers of light that helped me find these treasures along the river.

1″ x 2″, found objects

In this strange time of Coronavirus preparedness, we’re being encouraged to gather enough food for two weeks of quarantine.  As I looked through my cabinets to check on our stores of dry goods and calculate how long they would last, I thought about the way that many Indian women wear gold jewelry as a way to own something of value that doesn’t belong to their husband and to keep it close and protected while also appreciating its beauty.  Here’s a current-crisis interpretation of wearing what’s valuable to us, made of beans, rice, quinoa and corn.