Monthly Archives: February 2021

1″ x 2″, found objects

I’ve been hanging onto the kinds of things that my kids fill their projects with for decades.  As a three-year-old in Uruguay I walked along the beach and collected the bits of old tiles that had been smoothed by the waves and washed up on shore.  I always surround myself with objects that have meaning and memory.  Called “memory objects” or “transitional objects”, they remind me of the person or place that they’re from.  I watched with awe as people who I knew joined the fad of reducing what they owned to only 100 items.  I could never do that.  But maybe if I make one pendant with each memory my collection will get smaller.  This pendant uses some of the tiles that I collected on the beach to bring me right back to the colors and patterns of South America in the ’80s. 

.5″x 1″, found objects

When I posted last week’s punny electronics pendant my husband suggested that I make this one, called “Part of the Resistance” with resistors from our pile of old electronics.  Aside from the obvious Star Wars reference, a somewhat haphazard but well-intentioned resistance seems particularly timely right now. Between the energetic neighborhood BLM protests at the end of our street with signs that got more bedraggled as the months rolled by to the not-officially-PTA-related letter writing campaigns to voters in Georgia, and the socially-distanced housing protest that one of my daughter’s classes is organizing, there’s a quiet, colorful movement afoot.

1″ x 2″, found objects

I definitely don’t have any extra energy to expend right now. In fact, it’s all used up by about 4:45 every afternoon.  But I do feel like there’s some potential energy; energy that would exist if I just had three extra hours to nap, that would exist if I just had one less job to do… so this pendant is a booster of energy.  With batteries and springs as energy storage, maybe some of it will transfer over to whoever’s wearing it.

1″x2″, glass and found objects

This week there were two different moments that reminded me of the mercury balls that I would play with as a kid whenever a thermometer would break. First, we were sitting around a fire pit in our friends’ yard in the snow, desperate to socialize despite all the limitations of COVID. When we put a piece of ice or snow on the rim of the fire pit it balled up and skittered along just like mercury, until it steamed away.  Then this pendant, with fused dichroic glass that looked silvery, asked for silver beads to fill some of the spaces.  When it was finished and I stepped back, it looked like balls of mercury running through the opening between the fused pieces.