La Frontera
A re-visioning of the 2013 exhibition La Frontera, presented in two sets of paired exhibitions on either side of the US-Mexico Border.
Ten years after the original exhibition La Frontera, the curators have re-visioned the show, including many of the original artists and also drawing from the community of artists who live and work in the borderlands. I'm so honored to be included again, and grateful to have come through the making process with a totally different experience. This time it was harder. I felt like I was circling around the subject at a great distance, not feeling equipped or qualified to talk about it, and it was months before I started seeing images, and finally found a way to put feeling into material. Much like the piece I made for the original exhibition, these reference specific situations but I'm less interested in telling a story than I am in capturing an emotion. For me, they are doing what jewelry often does, which is to hold a big memory in a small space.
Voices/Voces, 2023
Powder coated steel, 18k gold, enamel paint, walnut
So many stories are lost in the noise of the border. Spoken at a human volume, they’re no match for the microphones and megaphones that pile words on this side or that side. Voices/Voces is my reflection on a conversation with a Mexican family member about her experience of decades of crossing, relating to and living with the US-Mexico border. She talked about early days, when the border was barely there, and how different it is now. Each story she told stood out in bright contrast to the cycles of data churning out from the border day by day, driving policy while reducing lived experiences to a blur.
Many thanks to M.P.
Border Signet, 2023
24-karat gold plated silver, graphite, rubber erasers
When a border is drawn, what is erased? Habitats, livelihoods, migration routes, kinship connections, biodiversity, access to basic necessities: food, water, medicine. Those with the power to create borders are rarely the ones to feel their impacts. Border Signet references historical signet rings which could be used from the comfort of a palace to seal agreements changing lives and landscapes hundreds of miles away. In place of an intaglio, the ring contains a sharpened graphite slab, positioned level with the erasers on either side.
“La Frontera explores the U.S.–Mexico border and what it represents as a physical reality, geopolitical construction, and condition of being. Working in contemporary jewelry, the artists included present stories of geography, identity, and desire, creating profound relationships between concept and the implied wearer.
First mounted in 2013, the original La Frontera exhibition considered the border as the physical place where complex relationships between Mexico and the U.S. are most visible. Re-curated on its tenth anniversary, La Frontera brings together many artists from its first iteration with artists from the borderlands, deepening the ways in which the exhibition includes the lived experiences of transfronterizxs.”
Many, many thanks to curators Mike Holmes and Lorena Lazard, and the incredible work of Jess Tolbert, Kerianne Quick and Cassandra Adame coordinating the show.
Penland
After a 15-year break from teaching, I was recently invited by the Penland School of Craft to create a class centered around my studio practice.
After a 15-year break from teaching, I was recently invited by the Penland School of Craft to create a class centered around my studio practice. Though there’s almost nothing as fun as teaching people to solder for the first time, I wanted the return to the classroom to reflect the time that had passed and what I’ve gained since I left teaching in 2003, and I felt like pushing a bit further. My studio has been a laboratory for so many explorations and discoveries over the last decade that I couldn’t have imagined as a student, or even as a beginning teacher, and those discoveries were what I was most excited to turn into a toolkit for other makers on a path like mine.
The resulting course was titled Streamlining in the Studio, and for two beautiful weeks in June, a dozen amazing students joined me in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a deep dive into design thinking as it applies to making jewelry and creating a livelihood.
Starting from the simple exercise of making paper clips by hand, we began to slow down our hands, observe our minds, and take in what we often overlook about getting through a day at the bench. Through a quick series of inquiries we developed a basic paperclip tool, then improved it, and improved it again…and found within an hour or so that a tiny shift in approach can bring the speed, ease, comfort and consistency of what we make to a completely different level. With that as a starting point, we began the search for the pain points in each student’s studio practice, and as a group helped each other overcome obstacles that had been keeping us from moving freely at the bench and in our businesses. We made piles of jigs and tools, shared advice and wisdom with each other, and had a ton of fun.
By the end of the session there were not just new ideas and perspectives on making, but even new language for what was happening. I loved every minute of it, I believe I learned as much as the students did, and I came back to my own studio feeling like a different maker. I’m so grateful to Penland for planting the seed.
Collaborations at Penland:
Top left, paperclip necklace in oxidized silver and 14k gold (Metals Students collaboration, donated to the session auction). Top right, earrings in sterling silver (collaboration with engraver extraordinaire Pierce Healey, donated to the session auction). Bottom row, brooch in paper, wood, ink and steel (multi-studio collaboration using Penland’s meal plan check-in sheets, donated to the session auction)
images from the studios on the Penland campus
TIMBER
Solo exhibition at Velvet Da Vinci Gallery, San Francisco, March 2016.
TIMBER
Solo Exhibition at Velvet Da Vinci Gallery, San Francisco, March 2016
TIMBER is about wood… and about falling, clearing, emptiness, and starting something new.
My studio is piled with wood. A lot of it I’ve gathered from the scrap bins of the furniture shops in my neighborhood, some I’ve pilfered from construction sites, and I often pick up pieces from the street. My favorite bits come from friends who know what I’m up to and save things for me, from precious places, attics, things being torn down, even an old ship. I love responding to the pieces as they come in, and the stories they come with, from the forest to my door.
The most recent additions to the pile came from my own house — over the past year we’ve spent our weekends making space: pulling down ceilings, taking out beams, pulling out all kinds of mysteriously constructed shelves and fixtures, and piling it all up in the garage. For a long time I left it there, feeling like it was almost too much to respond to — and then one day I took a piece to the studio, put it on the band saw and started cutting it up. Right away I felt something resolving, some circle closing, and a huge sense of relief at the idea of my own experience, all the strain, work, worry, and so much history in that house before us, going through a band saw blade to become something totally fresh, different, and uncomplicated by the past.
TIMBER keeps going through my mind as I watch the wood transform, break, absorb color, smooth down or splinter off, showing its structure and its weak points. Everything changes, and everything that falls away makes room for something new.
Factories
Imagined architecture, originally conceived for the Under One Roof exhibition in the Boiler Room Gallery at Heath Ceramics.
Imagined architecture, originally conceived for the Under One Roof exhibition in the Boiler Room Gallery at Heath Ceramics.
My studio is a part of the Heath Collective, a small group of maker studios that occupies space in Heath Ceramics’ San Francisco factory building. The idea of “Under One Roof” was to make a space for the artists here to respond both to each other and also to the building which is our common ground.
I have lots of affection for factories in general: looming, dirty, forbidding buildings huffing and belching smoke are comforting and fascinating for me. Even when I can’t begin to guess what’s going on inside, I know on some level it’s an extension of hand work and I feel friendly toward big machines. The Heath factory in particular is actually far from dirty or dark — it’s beautiful — but working away inside it I have a feeling of connection to American industry and of being a small, happily functioning part of something much bigger than myself.
The factories are tiny, just an inch or two tall, and were installed as a mini-landscape in the shadow of the huge black steel pipes and plates of the WWII naval ship boilers left from the building's original function as a laundry, which give the Boiler Room Gallery its name. They are made from steel and hardwood, much of which was actually scrounged from the Heath building as they were retrofitting and tearing out walls left and right. They are mostly nostalgic, vaguely political, definitely not literal. They can’t decide if they’re reliquaries or toys.
Factories are available as an ongoing series through the studio.
Bells
A collaboration with Tung Chiang, studio director at Heath Ceramics.
Tung Chiang, studio director at Heath Ceramics and also my workshop neighbor, has been gathering bells over the years and suggested we collaborate to make a small series of wind bells combining his hand-thrown ceramic pieces with clappers made by me in metal and wood.
Neither of us knew how hard it is to make a nice-sounding bell, so we decided it was a great idea, he started throwing clay forms and I began to experiment with brass, string and wood. Many, many months and lots of scraps later, we finally did emerge with a model with beautiful details (including a hidden but exquisite Chinese button-knot hand-tied by Tung) and a nice tone, and we began the actual making of them.
Tung threw each bell by hand and we chose the glaze colors together, and with the help of my studio crew I fabricated seven sets of jointed clappers in oxidized brass and hardwood, with hand-carved– and painted sails. The seven original bells have all found homes, but a limited production version of these is in the works.
La Frontera
Exhibition at the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City, and at Velvet Da Vinci Gallery in San Francisco.
This exhibition exploring the idea of "borderlands" was curated by Velvet Da Vinci Gallery and exhibited at the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City before traveling to San Francisco (Velvet da Vinci) and Houston, TX (Houston Center for Contemporary Craft).
Of all the images I came across while researching for the exhibition, the most compelling to me were the series of warning maps which had been created by the NGO Humane Borders to show the dangers of crossing the border through the desert on foot. The maps show routes clustered with red dots (each dot representing the location of a death in the desert) overlaid with circles indicating the distance on foot from the border.
The border is such a complicated thing, with so many political angles, moving parts, stories and stakes on both sides, it has always been difficult for me to form any clear opinion of how either side is handling the responsibility of being a neighbor. These maps stood out to me in their sadness but also in their simplicity: these deaths are not a matter of opinion. Each red dot represents a human experience that no one could wish for another regardless of politics.
The brooch is a reference to traditional Victorian mourning jewelry, which often contains a remnant of hair from the loved one lost. In this case, all that remains is a red dot. The small enameled pins are arranged in an abstraction of a cactus flower which grows in the Arizona desert and stands out from the landscape with a brilliant red.
Above: Three Days Walking (Mourning Brooch). Steel pins, vitreous enamel, steel, wood. 50 mm x 50mm x 7mm.
This piece is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Ornaments
A holiday collaboration with Flora Grubb.
A lovely collaboration with my friend Flora Grubb, purveyor of the most beautiful succulents in San Francisco. She wanted to create a holiday ornament that held a living succulent cutting, which could be re-planted and continue to grow after the holidays had passed. Together we designed a simple, subtle, bright little hook with a tiny dish and spike, which perfectly displays the succulent and hangs it gracefully from a branch.
This is the largest production run I’ve ever done in my studio. We made over 1,000 of these, and it was an amazing test of my design skills, my equipment and the ingenuity of my little studio crew.
Hives
A presentation of 30 pendants at Gallery Lulo in Healdsburg, California, October 2010.
A presentation of 30 pendants at Gallery Lulo in Healdsburg, California, October 2010.
This collection was made in the months before my 40th birthday, and it was a moment of transition on many fronts, the most significant being my search for a place to live and work in San Francisco. I fixated on the notion of the Hive as a home, and with that theme in place, I let myself be completely free with my materials, using gold, silver, wood, steel, stone and enamel, treating them all as equal in preciousness and potential. I engraved, carved, burned, painted, etched and fabricated my way to a series of objects which had only their form in common.
