Monthly Archives: October 2023

1″ diameter, found objects

I’ve always been fascinated by what’s inside things. Tiny drawers,  the animals we explored in dissection club, books and jars. What I love about it is that it’s always a surprise.  Even the clear jars hold so much more than what you can see through the sides. It’s spelunking and science class all in one. This pendant represents the complexity of what’s inside. The feelings and thoughts and blood vessels of a person, or the gears and circuits and tiny crystals in watches.

1″x .75″, found objects

Last week’s pendant had real beetle wings, and this week’s accidentally turned into an abstracted beetle. Once I combined the iridized beads and the ridged piece of an old bracelet there was no denying it’s beetle-ness.  Those are certainly legs.  And antennae.  When I lived in Chile I had the opportunity to paint a mural with a non-representational painter and I found it so difficult to move beyond abstraction to non-representational work.  A circle was representational.  A line could be.  My brain couldn’t really process what wasn’t.  Today I’m fine with that.  I’ll hide meaning in my shapes and let you find some too.

1″ x 1″, found objects

I wanted this pendant to play with the contrast between shiny and dull, and the materials were easy to find in my stash.  A beetle wing for the shiny, and tiny pieces of slate to show off the beetle wings’ high shine.  When I looked at the wing pieces I thought the wing looked “metálica” and then I thought “I haven’t thought about Metallica since High School!”  And now, no matter how hard I try, I can’t look at the pendant without hearing Heavy Metal in my head.

1″x1″, found objects

You all know by now that I don’t actually think very many things are junk, and I tend to collect bits and pieces of things that look interesting or strange.  I like to sort them and organize them when I’m in the mood, but I also like the happenstance of things ending up next to each other in a pile or on a table of supplies. I see unexpected color combinations, I notice something about one texture relative to another, and the shapes play well together.  That’s the beauty of a junk drawer.  I can see each object in a new way.