Emily Bhargava

1”x1”, glass and found objects

Maybe it’s a little too literal for a pendant about health, but after having the flu for a week all of my glass looks like germs.  A few weeks ago I ordered the kids a bottle of lotion that glows under UV light and we used it to practice handwashing.  It’s pretty scary to see what a 4 year-old leaves on his hands when he “washes” them, and it reminds me why I’ve been getting sick so often.  The left side of this pendant is some germy-looking glass with a silvered finish, and on the right is the flip-side of the same glass, with a brighter, healthier looking shine.

1” diameter, found objects

Last week the kids and I watched a Magic School Bus episode about recycling and reuse, and it showed the way the world would be if we didn’t recycle. Piles of garbage, playground equipment turned back into the bottles and cans that it had been made out of, and no more trees.  I found this earring in my salvage pile, beautifully made by another artist, but broken. Instead of throwing it out I’ve turned it into a pendant and given it a second life.

$45

2”x1”, found objects

Political decisions are so mired in the present that no one is taking a moment to balance short-term wins with long-term implications. Even though I’ve never been a big fan of science fiction, it’s future-focused, trying to imagine how everything will play out if we change a factor or set something in motion.  It seems to me that that’s what we’re missing right now at the highest levels, a little bit of imagination and forethought.  This pendant uses cast-off pieces of technology to create a form that looks like a transponder…or a spaceship…or whatever futuristic gadget you can imagine.

$45

1”x1”, found objects

It’s so satisfying to find the right place for something, to put it back where it belongs. When the things around me are organized I feel calmer, but that doesn’t mean that I want to have less things or to have less variety, just that each thing should have its ‘right’ place.  This pendant makes a series of perfect places, an array of interesting objects. Using jewelry findings as dividers, the objects in the pendant vary in texture, color and form, making a beautiful, and organized, collection.

1.5”x1.5”, glass

I’ve known some of my friends for many decades now, and as we’ve grown we’ve shaped each other. Through debate, conversation and shared experiences we’ve become more alike, even if just in tiny ways.  Friendships are like influences that you get to choose. Choose a person who you admire as a friend, and as you spend time together a little bit of that person gets absorbed.  This pendant represents two people merging and influencing one another. The complimentary (and opposite) colors of purple and yellow meet, blend together slightly, and become something richer and more interesting.

$45

1”x2”, found objects

It’s been amazing to watch my friends’ children turn into people with real personalities, interests, and goals.  As they grow I can start to see which parts of them are passed down from their parents, and which parts are all their own. When I think about my own greats and great-greats I don’t know exactly what’s been passed down to me, but I have some objects that give me a sense of who they were. This pendant is made from the tag that was attached to a pair of leather gloves that were bought (and never worn) by my great-grandmother.  They made their way to me, but don’t fit on my hands.  Clearly I didn’t inherit her bone structure, but maybe I have other parts of her hidden inside.

1.5” diameter, glass, found objects

Racism and sexism keep people from even being exposed to fields that might interest them, jobs that might offer better pay and educational paths that could lead in new directions. This pendant explores what it would look like if there were equal opportunity and equal exposure.  The gear at the center is like a merry-go-round that turns, letting people on and off at different stops along the way.  There’s some randomness in the system, but if the people on the merry-go-round are diverse, and they all have a chance to get off at any stop, then we’ll move closer to the diversity of the crowd that forms a border.

$45

1”x1.5”, ceramic, glass, found objects

Today, as I move through a milestone birthday, it’s clear that aging can happen with fear, with wistfulness, or with grace. I suppose there’s always a mixture of the three, but I hope grace can take the lead.  I chose the pieces in this pendant to match my own colors. The brown of my hair, now mixed with gray and silver, the purple that still peeks through, and the bits and baubles that I have to use to fix the parts of me that break now and then. All of these pieces, each one unique and imperfect, are set in an adhesive that I mixed to the color of my skin.

$45

1”x1”, glass beads

I spent some time thinking about how best to represent joy, jumping immediately to bold colors and moving away from the calm blues and greens that I’m always drawn to. But what shapes represent joy? Joy spreads, joy spills, joy radiates, but joy certainly isn’t carefully placed and contained, so when it came time to actually make the pendant, what felt right was to spill the colorful beads and let them land as they wished, frozen in the unplanned shapes and bold color combinations that they happened to form.  After working on other pendants for hours with tweezers to turn individual beads on their sides to hide their holes it was liberating and joyful to leave each piece as it landed.

2”x1”, found objects

This pendant definitely bends the rules as far as what counts as mosaic, but since I made the rules for this project, I can bend them.  I’ve been trying for weeks to mosaic the image of a peacock feather, and it’s been super hard.  At the small scale of a pendant, none of them came out even resembling a feather. So, frustrated, I decided to just use a real peacock feather.  And, lo and behold, it’s more beautiful than anything that I could have done to copy it.  And, by happy coincidence, I get to post a pendant of a turkey feather on Thanksgiving!

2”x.25″, mirrored glass

The gray days are getting more intense, and every year at this time I wonder why anyone chooses to live in New England.  I long for sunshine, and I’m not convinced that the special light therapy lamp I have in the living room will help as much as a dose of actual sunshine.  This pendant repurposes mirrored golden glass into a sunny, light-bouncing necklace.

1”x1.5”, ceramic

What caught my eye about the plate that turned into this pendant was its small size, the sophistication of its edges, and its antiqued shine. Before I could break it and make it into something new and shiny my 4 year-old pinned a “note” to it that said I couldn’t break it because it was made in the woods by Rama and Sita during their exile.  The good news is that some version of the story of Diwali is sinking in for him, and that the plate does indeed have a special pull to it.  I broke a second plate, keeping the one he had connected to Rama and Sita intact.  This pendant is a nod to the beauty that comes with retelling stories through the generations and the dignity that objects can absorb from the history we ascribe to them.

1”x1”, vitreous glass tile

I’ve been thinking about how much privacy matters, and how it can be comforting to know that something will be kept confidential, but also about how being closed off can make it hard to deepen relationships.  As I made this pendant with dark strips of glass that suggested bars obscuring a view, I wanted to make the bars irregular, allowing small glimpses between them. What emerged looked a lot like tree bark, the tree’s way of protecting itself.

1″x1″, mosaic with glass and paper

The glass ceiling is an image that’s always intrigued me.  A beautiful idea, being able to look up at the stars or the clouds, but also a barrier to reaching the sky.  As far as my professional world is concerned,  there’s a glut of women in both art and public health, but the most lucrative and respected positions are still held by men.  But I’m a glass artist, and I break glass all the time, so I’ve thrown a rock at this particular glass ceiling.  Made with paper set under clear glass and grouted to highlight the broken spaces, this pendant about challenging  unspoken rules is also an untraditional mosaic that challenges the expectations of what can become tesserae.

mixed media, 1″x1″

It’s about time.  I’m finding myself setting my alarm clock and sometimes even using my phone as aback-up alarm.  And when I have a few minutes in between meetings it’s like a little breather, but I’m still watching the clock, counting the minutes until I have to do the next thing.  So this pendant slows time down.  Actually, it stops it.  With the hands of an antique clock set to mid-day it just holds time in place, relishing all the possibility that afternoon holds.

1”x1.5”, glass tiles

My mom always said that ice cream was the best medicine.  She may also have said that sleep is the best medicine, but ice cream is what stuck.  I’m not sure how it happened, but my kids now know to ask for ice cream when they’re sick, so this remedy has made it through at least one more generation.  The ice cream cone in this pendant uses the textured back side of a vitreous glass tile as a cone, and iridized glass for the background.  The cherry on top is a red glass bead.

$45

1.5” diameter, mixed media

Friends of mine, all moms of small children, have been talking a lot lately about pocket vacations, the couple of minutes that you can find here and there during the day that feel like a break or a mini vacation. Maybe it’s a five minute shower, or a walk from the car to the grocery store.  I started to imagine what it would look like to actually have a vacation in your jeans pocket and be able to just glance in whenever you need it.

1”x1”, found objects

As summer draws to a close I’m seeing less and less bees, but I know they’re still out there, making honey and pollinating flowers. I was trying to explain to my daughter recently why it’s so terrible that the bee population is shrinking.  Our health is linked to the health of the bees, so this pendant celebrates both bees and honey, with imagery and colors that remind me of sweetness.

glass and ceramic, 1”x1”

I’ve been thinking about the ways that rain can force me to pause and take a little bit of a breath.  Whether it’s a soccer practice being rained out that gives us an unexpected hour and a half, or a rainstorm that means we choose to drive instead of taking the bus and we end up listening to a good story on the radio, it can create pockets of calm. I’m going to try my best to hold onto this idea as the sun fades and the winter sets in.   The ceramic in this pendant is broken to look like the small stones that get kicked up by the rain, and the glass and mirror catch the light like raindrops.

Mixed media, 1/2”x2”

Things change.  When I’m feeling secure I can adjust, change the plan, and still end up somewhere near where I wanted to be.  When I’m less sure I have a lot more trouble adjusting.  In this pendant the small beads flow like water around the large glass obstacles.

Glass and ceramic, 1/4”x2” 

On a walk through the woods during our camping trip this summer we found mushrooms of every color of the rainbow reaching up from the musty ground.  They were beautiful, but there’s something more elemental about the color green reaching up from the brown earth.  This simple pendant uses glass and ceramic tile, murky and imperfect like leaves and moss, to show the color progressions of brown earth to green growth.  I like the fact that this pendant is small.  Even small changes count.

mixed media, 1” diameter

For a country with an unbelievable number of rules (some spoken, most unspoken) about how to act, where to be, what to eat, what gifts should be given on each occasion and more, India has surprisingly few rules about color.  Here in New England we have a lot of rules, and they definitely extend to color.  My Grandmother always told me no white after Labor Day, houses shouldn’t be bright blue, and each wall should be painted in just one color.  In India the colors are loud, anything goes, and the brighter the better.  This pendant, named ranga, the Hindi word for color, with its hot pink center, gold-colored edge, silver-colored setting and colorful shiny border celebrates the bright loud colors of India and all the joy they express.