Oldstone Studio, New Milford, CT
In a world overflowing with cheap goods, people need more handmade objects about which the maker has cared deeply. That is my defense, my hope, and my goal. That what is deeply satisfying to me will prove to be so for others.
Having been a basket maker and a sculptor, I started stringing beads the way someone else might work a crossword puzzle, as a comfort and a distraction. I liked the colors, the simplicity, and the immediacy. But as my interest in making jewelry grew, I began to incorporate recycled materials, and then to shape more and more of the components by my own hand.
Now, the designs all originate in my head. They grow into obsessions, threatening to take me over unless I solve the problem of how to create them. That combination of vision, focus, tension and release is the root of my addiction to making jewelry.
I began my professional career as a surveyor in New England, where mapping and measuring the land means spending a great deal of time in the woods. Whatever led me there compels me still, as the same themes—from geometric shapes and mathematical precision to the patterns, colors and textures of nature—can be found in my jewelry. Perhaps that explains the primitive, earthy feel I’m after. I want to make jewelry that looks as if an archeologist had just dug it up. I want to make, not just art, but artifacts.
