I can’t ever remember a time in my life when metal didn’t fascinate me. I can still remember the way the old tarnished brass door latches in my parents’ house tasted back when I was a toddler learning the world through new objects the typical way a toddler does – by mouth.
Nothing has changed much. I still hold my silver wire in my mouth while I’m working on a pair of earrings, adding sparkly gems and beads to my latest creation.
Metal is in my DNA. I love the feel of it, the different texture of buttery smooth gold, grainy silver, hot velvet copper, and the cool rigidity of brass and bronze. Metal is my muse, my nemesis, my baby, depending on what day it is.
My art in metal is my mark upon the world, it will be here long after I’m gone. Perhaps in a thousand years it will be unearthed again in an archeological dig. I like to contemplate what they will think of it then, since our current culture is so quick to imagine that all antiquities are symbols and expressions of some religious ritual. If so, then metal is my religion. I faithfully practice it, immerse myself in it, pray that what I want to express will be released through it.
Just like fabric, or clay, or paint is natural to some, metal is most natural to me. We are symbiotic, metal and I. In some primal level beyond consciously learned knowledge I understand the properties and characteristics, the personality of metal. I know we go way back thousands of years together, back to a life when I found a chunk of ore and pounded it into a talisman to tie around my neck with a slip of sinew. There is a subconscious resonance to the primal yearning in all of us to create a sacred alter with our special talismans of self expression and adornment.
It is no wonder that I grew up teaching myself how to work with metal. Metal is the primary springboard of jewelry throughout the ages, at least the jewelry that has survived the span of the ages.
Personal adornment, jewelry, was one of humanity’s oldest and most primary forms of self-expression. Jewelry is my passion. It pulls like a magnet at the strands of my metallic DNA. The working of metal into jewelry is my primary function; it is what I was put on this earth to do. I feel it in the core of me, throughout my many reincarnations, it has been a basic ingredient in the creation of my soul.
When someone is drawn to my jewelry, they often tell me they feel magic in it, that it touches something deep within, even that it has changed their lives in some way. I believe that perhaps what they may be feeling is the echo of the beginning of time, borne in the manifested creations of my ancient metallic soul.