Monthly Archives: March 2023

1″ diameter, found objects and glass

We had two wet, cold, rainy days this week and their only saving grace was that the raindrops were beautiful. They set me to thinking about all the different kinds of rain that fall in the spring.  The driving rain, the misty wet air that somehow wets the windshield but doesn’t wet your hair, the big fat droplets, and the slow, steady rain that doesn’t keep you inside, but still manages to flood the basement after a few days.  This pendant only captures the big fat droplets and the driving rain, but suggests the rest of the types of wet that all lead up to planting summer veggies.

2″ x .5 “, glass beads

I learned during my anthropology training that ladders are one of a very few images (along with snakes, actually) that exist in every culture, regardless of whether they’re used regularly in the region. I like them as a metaphor.  One step at a time, connecting, bridging, leading, climbing.  And I like the idea of looking for them where they weren’t meant to be, the way people see faces in rocks and bark and clouds.  In this pendant the beads glitter distractingly, and the path is uneven, but there’s a ladder to climb if you look for it.

1″ x 1″, found objects

Scale is a confusing thing. It hurts my brain to think too hard about whether I’m big compared to the littlest things (I’ve been reading a lot about microbes lately) or tiny compared to the biggest things (the universe, the planet…) and then it’s even more complicated to think about how we each want to be given personal space and creative flexibility, but we also want to be surrounded and held by others.  What’s enough space?What’s too much?  This pendant is a meditation on space, the personal kind and the planetary kind.

.5″x 1″, found objects

Last week’s pendant reminds me of a spider, and this week’s is more like a lightning bug, bringing just a flash of momentary light to the situation…or the season. Thankfully daylight savings is right around the corner and days are getting longer.

1″ diameter, found objects

I like the word composition, partly because it spans writing, music, visual art, dance and more.  While there’s nothing inherently complicated about taking pieces of your chosen art and deciding how to put them together, I know I couldn’t do it in any medium that I don’t know deeply. I can’t string together notes. I couldn’t begin to choreograph a dance.  But with my glass and beads and baubles I know how to arrange, re-arrange, consider balance and form, think about color, and adjust until I have a tiny composition that looks, somehow… right.