Monthly Archives: November 2020

1″ x 2″, seed beads

This is a cross-over COVID and Thanksgiving post.  This week I looked at a heat map of the COVID cases in my city and the bright spots mapped perfectly onto the lower-income, immigrant-rich neighborhoods.  It wasn’t new news for someone like me who works in public health, but it still hit me in the gut to see it laid out visually.  So, for Thanksgiving, I’m thankful that I was lucky enough to be born where I was born, into the family that I was born into, and as a result, to live in the part of the city that’s green on the heat map.  I’m also thankful that my work lets me tackle the underlying racism and xenophobia that leads to such a stark difference in COVID risk for different people in the city. It’s a big job.

2″ x 2″, found objects

I’m sure it’s hard to figure out why this piece and the title are connected, but I’ll explain.  This week my brain was on overload for a lot of reasons, and I didn’t have a chance to pause and think about a creative pendant design.  But I did find this amazing metal insect, and I had to turn it into something for myself. I sat down for a moment to fill the background with seed beads and I was lost in the task, my mind blank for the first time in days.  Yesterday I was watching a British cooking show and twice they called their tasks “mindful”. First when stirring batter and then while peeling garlic.  When I learned about mindfulness it was always based on an intentional meditation, but I love the reminder that peeling garlic or placing beads can count just as much.

2″ x 2.5″, ceramic and found objects

These aren’t the colors I usually reach for, but our smoke tree, which is a beautiful rich purple in the spring and produces smoky puff-like blooms that last  all summer, has turned into a fiery mass of leaves. The reds and oranges and yellows are gorgeous, and they remind me of the backyard fires we’ve been making with friends.  If you looked at the pendant from the side you’d see that to accommodate the copper ring, the ceramic pieces form a wave like the ones we’ve been riding these last few weeks.

1″ x 2″, found objects and slag glass

We’re in a holding pattern with the election results right now, waiting for absentee ballots to be counted, waiting for the word on key states, and then probably waiting for a re-count in some of those states.  This pendant uses my favorite objects, watch parts, to represent the waiting that we’re all doing (and some of the machinations of our federal system). I’ve included slag glass, a colorful bi-product of the high heat of iron production, and a crystal that looks like a diamond, a beautiful result of ultra-high pressure.  I have my fingers crossed for a lot of reasons as I wait, and one of the things that I’m hoping for is that out of this pressure-filled mess of the covid pandemic, endemic racism, entrenched disparities and what might be a contested election, there might emerge something unexpected and beautiful.