Emily Bhargava

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.

1″ x1″, glass

It’s snowing outside, and the forecast for tomorrow is for windchills that bring the temperature below 10 degrees.  I can’t really think about much other than how to stay warm, so when I sat down with the beautiful dichroic glass scrap that I finally got around to ordering, I gravitated, perhaps for the first time, to the warmer colors.  I can’t wait to fuse some of it into bits and pieces that will find their way into pendants for another week.  And running the kiln for 16 hours will keep the studio nice and toasty!

1″ diameter, coin

I was living in Chile in 1998, when this coin was minted.  That was the year that Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator for many years, was indicted in London for the crimes that he committed while in power.  His arrest opened old wounds and old debates among my Chilean friends, and I learned a lot about the far-reaching and long-lasting effects of abuse of power, and I was not surprised but was still horrified by the United States’ role in the military coup so far from our soil. Despite being divisive, the arrest provided some closure and public censure.  I’m watching events unfold here in the US in 2021 and am pleased to see a swift impeachment, but wonder what all of the long-lasting ripples of this presidency will be.

1″ x 2″, glass, stone, metal

If there’s one thing that last night’s attempted coup reinforces, it’s that the people in
this country are not aligned.  Philosophically, politically, ethically, there’s not just disagreement, but a much more deeply-rooted difference in perspectives and beliefs that make it hard to see across the divides.  This pendant is one that I’ve been working on for weeks, bit by bit.  I found the ring and chose an off-center spot for it.  I filled it in with stones, and then I cut the thinnest of the filati that I’d pulled into short lengths.  I lined some of them up with each other and let the others head in different directions.  In the end, the blue filati look like cloth, woven of tiny strands, strengthened by having pieces facing in each direction. I hope that despite our differences in perspective, we can all come together to align at least some of our actions and to keep the fabric of the community strong.

1″x 2.5″, found objects

I’m hoping that the new year brings a new calm.  Most people can only feel serene in a clean, almost-empty space, but I only really feel at peace surrounded by stuff that I love.  I’m always working toward the perfect balance of full, colorful, meaningful and organized, adding things that are beautiful and taking away what makes a space feel too overstuffed.  The calm but observant expression on the golden face that I used in this pendant struck me.  I tried to create a setting for it that has the richness, texture, and variety that makes me feel calm, but with a limited palette to strike the ever-important balance between too little and too much.

1″ x 1″, mirrored glass

My grandmother moved into memory care yesterday and on the way she said “I don’t know when it was that I got to be so old and helpless”.  Some transitions, like the one from her old room to another room in another building in another city, are harsh and immediate, but others are gradual, so slow that they can’t even be pinpointed.  This pendant transitions from blues to greens gradually. You can see the borders but there’s no clear line to mark the change.

.75″ x .5″, glass

This week I made a micro-mosaic inside an old gear (from one of the first mills in Massachusetts). The gears that members of the New England Mosaic Society make will all be shown at the Charles River Museum of Industry and then sent down to be installed in Rachel Sager’s Ruins Project.  Inspired by Rachel’s filati work, I turned on my torch for the first time this year and pulled what I’d call messy cane and the mosaic world would apparently call filati. Turns out it’s lots of fun! This pendant, in a smaller bezel than usual, is made from sections of filati turned on their ends and  from the the smooth, curved sections of glass that came from where I grabbed the hot glass with my tweezers.

1″ diameter, found objects

Across Boston starting this evening, you can visit 8 light-filled installations by 8 different artists to celebrate the 8 days of Hanukkah. Organized by JArts, the exhibit is called Brighter Connected. (My piece of the exhibit, a series of collaborative stained glass windows about family traditions called “Looking In”, is at the Woburn Public Library.  Check it out!).  This pendant celebrates the truth of the concept that together we shine brighter and can accomplish more.

1″ x 1″ found objects

We took a hike on Friday near Ponakapoag Pond and as promised, it was magical.  Gnarly twigs, a deep bog, moss, carnivorous plants, and beautiful lichen covering the branches.  For this pendant I tried to capture the colors and textures of the lichen on branches in my own medium.  Metal with green patina, glass, and ceramic, all with the same amazing unexpected combinations that you can find outdoors.

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.

1″ x 2″, glass

This pendant is very special because it’s part of another chain for “Translations“, a project that I participated in just before Covid.  This week I received a poem from Maya, inspired by a painting by Tova, and this pendant is my response to the poem.  My pendant will be passed to Maria to inspire an assemblage. With themes of reflection and identity, the poem made me think about the way that the reflection of an object is distorted.  The distortion can make it look more impressive than it really is, or less. My fingers are crossed (hard) that in this week’s elections the country will vote based on what’s real and not based on a distorted reflection of reality that makes things seem better than they are.  The design represents a moon in a dark sky, reflected in the waves below.

.5″ x 2″, watch parts

When I look at my calendar these days it looks like the kind of puzzle that makes my head hurt.  Entries in six different colors, bumping up against each other and sometimes overlapping.  Zoom classes, work meetings, conferences, reminders, visits, soccer, webinars. Even the grocery shopping has to make its way onto the calendar or it’ll fall off the list.  This pendant is made from watch parts, organized like a complex puzzle that just about fits together.

1″ x 1″, found objects

As a kid I would probably have written an ode to the MBTA.  Living by a T stop gave me easy access to the city and a freedom that most of my friends didn’t have.  As I’ve moved around the world I’ve tried to choose cities that have good public transportation.  But now the T is one more thing we’re avoiding during covid. And where would we go anyway?  But I miss it.  I’ve been wanting to check out the newly-cleaned Lilli Ann Rosenberg mosaic at Park Street station, but I’m still not riding the T.  Maybe wearing this pendant with its old token that’s been touched by so many hands will work like a charm to bring the day closer when we can all safely move around Boston again. 

1″ x 2″, glass and ceramic

There are a lot of transitions happening right now, and they all feel like a way to start fresh.  The Jewish new year just started, my mom’s preparing for surgery that should give her heart a fresh start, and my grandma’s pretty much starting fresh every few minutes these days.  This pendant has a lot of white to represent a blank slate and freshness, but it also has seams and stains to represent what’s come before.  We never start fully fresh, but build on our messy past.

1″ x 2″, glass

The weather is getting cooler and our weekly farmshare is getting darker.  One of the highlights of my week is picking up our fruits and vegetables from the mini-mobil farmstand that Farmer Craig sets up in our neighborhood.  While I relish the tomatoes and baby greens that come early in the season I actually like the root vegetables and heartier vegetables that come in the fall too.  This pendant showcases the colors of this season’s vegetables.  olive green, brown, dark purple and deep green, with just a touch of gold.

1″ x 2″, glass and found objects

This week the kids begin remote schooling, and all our limits on screen time are officially out the window.  with class from 8 AM to 5:30 PM it’s a long day of electronics.  I’ve been thinking about all the wearables and extra screens that people have been choosing to use over the last few years, and how perhaps having to do all of our learning and socializing through a screen is going to make them less appealing.  This pendant uses reflective glass, old electronics and wire to create what looks like an aged wearable computer.

1″ x 1.5″, found objects

We went camping this week to try to fill some of the days before school starts (in some fashion) again. I was in the woods, sorting through beads for kids to use during their at-home learning, and somehow sitting among the trees by a lake with poison ivy and amazing caterpillars, the plastic beads just felt fake.  It was the metal ones that spoke to me, seeming more real and more comforting than the others.  This pendant is made mostly from an assortment of not-beads from the bead bin.  Metal pieces with no holes, a stone, and a chain.  My son says it looks like a bird, a person with hair or a mermaid, so hopefully it’ll speak to each of us in some way.

1″x 3.5″, spoon and scrap steel

Instead of being in my studio full of glass, I spent the weekend welding at Snow Farm.  After making a carload of large sculptures I used my last few minutes to gather smaller bits from the mountain of scrap metal and to pull out the pieces I’d cut from sheet metal with the plasma cutter.  This pendant combines a spoon and some hand-cut scrap into a graceful leaf-shaped pendant.  While eventually I’d like every weld of mine to be beautiful, for now I love knowing what James Kitchen, our amazing instructor, taught us, that although they’re imperfect, the welds are much stronger than the metal that they’re connecting. I like the idea that by being connected each piece becomes stronger.

1″ x 1″, found objects

This may not be real lace, but it’s lacy enough for me to count it for this week’s “lace” anniversary.  I found it at the beach at low tide, and my identification app tells me that it’s Coralline, a red algae that grows on rocky shores.    I’ve always loved fractals, and collecting shells, and this particular beach find hits both the marks.

1″ x 1″, found objects

We’ve had some loose teeth in the house lately, and a couple of visits from the tooth fairy.  There’s also been a lot of hypothesizing about what, exactly, the tooth fairy might do with all the teeth she collects.  When I was a kid I insisted on keeping all of my teeth.  I had them in a little marble box, and I was fascinated by them, in the same way I was fascinated by gems and pinecones and glass eyes.  I think I might actually belong in the age of taxidermy and cabinets of curiosity.  But other people seem disgusted by teeth once they’re not in a mouth, so I was thrilled to find these stones that look an awful lot like teeth at the bottom of Tully Lake.  Here, to horrify anyone who thinks its real and thinks that’s weird, is my tooth stone.

1″ x 2″, glass and found objects

Today I installed a mosaic at a senior housing site in Brighton. The installation was inspired by a huge colorful sculpture of a flower that Lilli Ann Rosenberg had made with residents of the building 40 years ago.  Lilli Ann’s mosaics were also in Newton Centre, and I walked by them, explored them and thought about them every day as a kid.  Later, on my first trip to Philadelphia, I was amazed by Isaiah Zagar’s huge, colorful, playful mosaics.  I love Laurel True’s work too.  As I learn more about “real” mosaic and the rules of andamento I don’t quite know how to place the mosaics that are so free-form and broken-looking within the bounds of the art world’s constraints, but they still make me smile the most.  This pendant, like the artists I like the most, breaks all the rules.