Category: jewelry

What is it about original, handmade jewelry? Pieces purchased directly from artists, the chance to visit in the studio, to get a glimpse of the process? I am lucky. I own jewelry that has been purchased directly from artists, some picked up in studios, others at art fairs, or online. Weirdly, happily, wonderfully, I have ended up with a number of works, acquired by purchase or gift, by Madison-area artist Teresa Faris.

I have wanted to write about Faris’ work for a long time. A metalsmith here in Madison, Faris teaches at UW-Whitewater and makes compelling, visually engaging jewelry. She is an artist who works in an art form that can be functional (worn), but who pushes her material and its expectations in decidedly non-functional directions with a process that excavates and increases the medium’s capacity to convey meaning.

Faris is not alone in this effort to crack open the world of jewelry and stoke its expressive power. Many artists in recent years have been traveling on this same path. The exhibition that just opened at the Chazen this weekend, Shelter: Crafting a Safe Home (organized by Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh), includes work by two other jewelry artists who are exploring this same, meaning-laden landscape, Motoko Furuhashi (another HSU grad!) and Demitra Thomloudis (an SDSU MFA). Although centered on different issues, all three of these artists utilize metal, in combination with other materials, to expand beyond beauty and decoration. In their work they contemplate physical space, personal identity, and the expressive power of experience, process and making.

In Houston Yellow Tape Project, a work included in the Shelter exhibition, Thomloudis presents a street map of a neighborhood that identifies only sites where homes have been torn-down. The map is enhanced by individual jewelry pieces that hang from the highlighted lots. The jewelry is an unexpected addition to the map, acting almost as game pieces, like the small metal shoe or top hat place-holders that occupy squares, indicating presence on a Monopoly board. Here they hang in front of a simple graphic of streets and lots. Some pieces are obvious as jewelry–pendants on chains, necklaces, brooches–but their materials deny expectations: some are constructed out of upholstery foam, others distressed wood, plastic, or unknown items.

The individual pieces are crafted of debris from the houses whose sites they mark. Thomloudis has gathered specific construction detritus and created functional works. The works serve as memorials to the demolished homes and to the neighborhood’s loss. They also, according to the artist, are intended to provide points of connection between people when worn, as conversation starters, as a means to connect and educate and share stories of what is gone.

Furuhashi is interested in similar ideas of place and specificity. The brooches and necklace that are included in the exhibition do not indicate loss, but rather utilize overlooked materials to redefine a sense of place. The artist takes map views and translates them into jewelry supports: street grids become the structure for brooches or the underlying organizational scheme of a necklace. The works are bejeweled not by precious stones, but by chunks of asphalt and concrete that have been excavated from locations noted within the mapped sites.

In combining a bird’s eye perspective and site-specific materials, Furuhashi creates abstracted portraits of places. Physical experience is represented in these works: a locating of self within a particular time, a network of streets; the steel and asphalt that support movement through the space are humble yet ubiquitous and powerful materials, they shape and underlie every passage.

Faris explores not a physical site but instead an emotional landscape. She finds meaning in intricate labor: crafting chains, sawing, riveting, and punching to create a calming, meditative space. In her work, the artist’s repetitive motions are related to the chewing and carving activity of a captive animal, specifically, the cockatoo who shares her home. Incorporating the brightly colored chews into elaborately sawn metalwork, Faris makes Collaborations with Bird, a series of works that pairs the productive output of co-located beings. Anxieties about personal well-being are considered in human and animal terms, equated, and found to be analogous in expression.

A similar focus on repeated actions is evident in a more recent series, CWaB:Lien. Exploring ancestral debt and assimilation, these works are punched and dapped, then soldered together into large swaths of small circular forms. The end result is stunning: glittering, seemingly cohesive silver bits connected into what appear to be sturdy medallions. But are they solid? What is behind that process of connection, integration, of piecing together, of fitting in? What is omitted in the creation of a homogenous group? What, if we consider our debts, is our inherited legacy?

It is this focus on the overlooked or unconsidered that connects the work of Thomloudis, Furuhashi, and–although not part of the Shelter exhibtion–Faris. All three artists utilize jewelry to refocus attention, to turn away from decoration towards more complex considerations. Not items merely to be worn, the pieces are meaningful because of their external referents–they are visually arresting and conceptually weighty. These metal and wood constructions relocate the wearer: we are moved away from surface beauty to a place where personal adornment becomes a powerful intellectual presence that conveys astonishing expressive potential.

(update: listen to an interview with me about the Shelter exhibition that aired on Sunday Afternoon Live, December 1, 2018).

(update 2: see a blogpost on the textiles in the Shelter exhibition, on the Chazen Museum of Art website).