FRAGMENTS: PLACE TO PLACE
‘Fragments Place to Place’
These works are a conflation of time, place, and states of mind. Palimpsest-like relief patterns in aluminum are revealed or subdued in contrast to images from California freeways and unruly steel lines.
While an artist in residence at the 19th century Jakob Bengel Factory in Idar-Oberstein, Germany in the summer of 2019, I aspired to respond to the environment while continuing my explorations of process as metaphor and jewelry as a psychological and social tool. In some works, this was enabled by conflating the 1920s embossing patterns with images of Southern California roadside scenery. A staid floral pattern layered over an image of electrical towers or freeway traffic becomes an image of contradictions. The process distorts the imagery and renders the surfaces vulnerable while the pattern is selectively revealed. The colored plates came to feel as if I were creating my own gems; layers of information representing time and place.
Metaphors of process were inspired by tooling intended to produce materials with consistent regularity in the factory production of costume jewelry. Instead, I ‘let accidents happen.’ The exaggerations of embossing and compressing warp the strip, and the relief pattern evocatively emerges from a smooth surface, still bearing faint lines of its original complexity.
Running out of time at the factory, I produced stock and brought it home.
And then 2020 happened and all focus was lost. As I returned to work, the embossings’ attained new value as a record of a rare time, place, and focus in contrast to my pandemic state of mind.