February 5, 2005

• As I write, I'm listening to my friend, Jade Maze, sing.  Joy.

  
  

  Did I ever say I was a jewelry designer?  In the mid-80's, when I was very ill and had almost ceased to function, when I couldn't read and retain more than 2 sentences at a time (severe depression impairs the ability to concentrate) a friend gave me some beads, telling me that whenever I put them down, they would remember where they were and it didn't matter if I could or not.  

  
  

  Somehow, and I really don't know how, I managed to gather myself together and make some earrings.  In a move far more daring than I thought myself capable of, I took them all to the buyer at the shop in the Duncan Philips Collection in DC, then known locally for carrying unusual jewelry and selling work of local artists.  

  
  

  The buyer looked and looked, then started shuffling the cards I had the earrings on.  "I'm trying to make them look like a line," she told me.  It was a while, maybe months, before I even figured out what a line was, but I nodded sagely at her statement.  "Well, I'll take them all except this one," she said.  I was so amazed that I don't remember my reaction, only that when I went back to pick up my check, I bought a glass paperweight for Sashi.  

  
  

  After that sale, I sold to the Smithsonian, a terrible place that waits 10 months to pay even little vendors, and then only if you call them every day for 3 months.  The National Museum of Women In The Arts took my work.  I sold on weekends at the market on capital hill, picking up such customers as heads of museums in Los Angeles, a little girl in town for the national spelling bee, and the one-time head of the National Endowment of the Arts.   I loved that place. 

  
  

  In Chicago, I sold to the Art Institute, the buyers telling me that they would buy anything I made, as did the buyer at the shop at the Field Museum.  I wasn't well, though, and could never stay consistently productive enough to build up a solid customer base.  And here, one has to pay two or three thousand dollars in January or February in show fees to ensure a place during the summer festivals, unlike DC, where you show up early at the market and if there's a place, pay $15.00 a day. I never had that kind of money all together in one place. 

  
  

  It never worked well in Chicago - women are much less adventurous than in DC.  When I went back there after 7 years a friend asked me why my jewelry wasn't very interesting any more.  On reflection, I realized that the interesting stuff didn't sell here or if it did,  it was only after being bargained way down on price when I wasn't selling much at a show and needed to cover the table fee.  

  
  

  On the next DC visit, I took those pieces I had made for my own pleasure and not just because I knew they would sell at a show with me and they sold, the first day, and well.  

  
  

  I've not designed in three years, but this is something else I feel myself coming back to, if only my health will hold.  

  
  

  I don't have many pictures of my work.  Here are a few - 

  
  

  This one came to me in a sort of dream, a reverie, wherein I saw tassels, then a group of berries.  This is tied with silk cord, and uses Czech glass with an iridescent finish called "blue iris" and made by putting a plain black glass bead in a vaccuum chamber and then, at high temperature, so that the vapor will adhere, injecting the iridescent metallic compound as a gas.  (carnival glass - carnival glass was made that way, in part to use of the huge stock of black beads lying around after the death of Queen Victoria who'd so popularized black clothing and jewelry. )  I made a bracelet by wrapping a piece three times around my wrist, a pair of earrings by tying a tassel onto a pure black plastic earwire, to keep the colorway going and not interrupted by gold or silver.  That's also why I used an antique button with the same finish for the clasp.                

  
  

                            

  
  

  Here's something very different.  There used to be a button store in town with a trunk on the floor full of ten cent buttons.  After several trips I had enough to make a number of bracelets from the buttons, sewn onto wide black elastic, itself reinforced with another band of the same, so that the bracelet supported the weight of the buttons and looked to be part of the composition, as they were all very sculptural.  

  
  

  Purple iris glass drops, placed irregularly at the edges, Deco and 50's plastic, Victorian porcelain on the other side, this one is my favorite.  Here I started doing double deckers, a smaller button on top of a larger one for a greater feeling of dimensionality.  That yellow button actually has a little orange button glued inside it.  I do miss that button store  - now it would take years to put these together.             

  
  

  Here's a view of another part of the bracelet.  The little cream with silver button on the far right is a Victorian "eyelash" porcelain button.  The little mauve one on top of the light green is most likely Czech glass and dates back at least to the early thirties, if not before.   The turquoise and maroon one on the left whose shape echoes so perfectly the 50's plastic one it's stacked on top of is also porcelain, and possibly as early as Victorian.  Can you tell I love these?

  
  

                       

  
  

  And then there's this one, where the conceit was using late 40's plastic nacre-covered faux shell buttons, juxtaposed with pierced circles of the real thing.  

  
  

                   

  
  

  I usually work with glass; the plastic buttons were a happening on the side.  Here's a bracelet of hand wound peking glass, large and small, rose quartz, blue lace agate and little old African  trade beads, with stripes, made in Venice for the African trade.  These I bought from an African trader who had wonderful things and has now disappeared into the fastnesses of Queens, no longer touring the country selling.  Alas.

  
  

                     

  
  

  Once, I designed for a fashion show.  This is the only photograph I have left of pieces from that, although there were two absolutely seminal pieces I did for that show. 

  
  

                                    

  
  

  And then there are the earrings from this series - leaded crystal, old costume jewelry pearls of wonderful lustre and color, often hand wound of glass, combined with layers of what we call brass "findings"- little bead caps of various sizes and shapes - which I've taken and oxidized with acid, turning them from bight brass to almost black, laquered and dried with a hair dryer so that the crumbs of rust won't shed on mi'lady's throat, or turn green.  The effect is somewhat otherworldly - passersby have called them "exotic fruit with black skin," "Victorian Christmas ornaments," and "pearls hiding in swaths of black lace."  I always  loved the way they said different things to different people.

  
  

  This picture is not a good one, and it won't open in the version of photoshop I have now so that I can neaten it up a bit, but you get the idea....

  
  

  All these pieces of me, all the things I can do have been living in me as fragments or splinters, not integrated into who I can feel myself to be each day. 

  
  

  Writing about them, putting the pieces down as I have been this past week, with photographs for the visual side of me, is good, important in the way journals have always been important, a way of knowing and seeing the self.  

  
  

  Geeze, that's me?

  
  

  pearlbamboo

  
  

  ©text and designs 2005

  • 4:06 am
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