All Things Metal ClayConferences | All Things Metal Clay

This year we have Barbara Heinrich, Ford/Forlano, Ted Gall, Bob Ebendorf and Andy Cooperman as our presenters. Registration is now open and those who register before June 27th will receive a $50
discount on the Conference and the 2014 Conference Swag Bag. Go to
http://www.coloradometalsmiths.org to sign up.

Creative Expo Chicago, March 14-15, 10 am – 4 pm

Elaine — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 21:10:59 +0000

Join us at the 2014 Creative Chicago Expo, March 14–15 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 10am–4pm. Connect with Chicago’s creative community, find resources and information for you to thrive. Choose from 30+ workshops and 140 exhibitors.

This year’s theme, Moving Forward, will be highlighted by four keynote speakers: artist Theaster Gates, chef Carrie Nahabedian, fashion designer Maria Pinto and filmmaker Robert Teitel. FREE – No RSVP.

For event details and schedule, visit creativechicagoexpo.org.

If you’re anywhere near Chicago, like say, a 250 mile radius, you’ve got to check out the impressive line up of speakers at this year’s Creative Chicago Expo.

If you’re not close enough to attend, the audio of the talks will be on Chicago Artist Resource (CAR) afterward.

I’ll be giving a speech called Blogging for Artists. I’ll post the link to the audio once it’s added to CAR.

Update! The keynote speeches will be online (are probably there already) at CANTV.org/watch. They were streaming live today and will stream live tomorrow (3/15).

What Advice Would You Give to College Students?

Elaine — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 04:55:02 +0000

I have the wonderful opportunity to give the speech, My Life in Jewelry this week at the Self-Employment in the Arts Conference, to a group of college students.

After only eight drafts, I finally got the speech just right.

After I’d finished it, I wondered if I’d chosen the right topics. So much to tell them! So much to share!

What would other jewelers tell college students, if they had the chance?

I posed that question on the Orchid list, and you can read the answers at Ganoksin.com. Here’s the thread. You can read the whole thread by clicking Thread Next to get to the next email in that thread. Lots of terrific, heartfelt responses.

What Are We Afraid of? (The Future of Craft)

Elaine — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:33:33 +0000

One thread that was consistent throughout the Zoom Symposium was that of the role of the maker. Each speaker addressed in some way, who we are, how to approach what we do and the environment we exhibit and sell in.

In this post, I’ll follow that thread as it winds from speaker to speaker, and tell the story with lots of pictures.

We’ll start with Arthur Hash, the laser engraving of enamels guy I introduced you to yesterday:

Arthur talked to us about high tech jewelry, how he uses the high tech tools, including laser engraving, laser cutting, 3D printing, powder coating and more.

My sense from the audience was that this group of primarily students, currently enrolled in BFA or MFA metalsmithing programs, were not super open to his approach to making.

One questioner asked Arthur, “Photographers have been replaced by digital photography, will we be replaced by 3D printing?”

Ah! There we go! This is the same resistance to new technology that inspires such invective on the Orchid list, where railing against CAD/CAM is almost daily.

Here’s a sample clip from a post from just yesterday:

“This is a perfect example of people are letting technology take over their brains. I could take gold wire and make a setting almost as
fast as it would take to turn on the computer and open the CAD
program. They now have boats that you can drive with a joystick
control, I will quit sailing before I will sail with a joystick. We
are being brainwashed with this stuff.”

(He went on to say that goldsmiths are a dying breed and in ten years will be able to name their price for their work. He could be right about that.)

Here’s my sum up of that general idea, which used to be my personal metalsmithing motto:

That got me thinking, What’s behind this fear of high tech production techniques?
Here’s a mind map on that question – a picture of a page from my sketchbook.

The lines coming out of that center say:

Upstarts can shortcut my training, do a run-around on me.

I will lose my status as Maker, hard-earned.

My objects will lose their status.

Let’s look at that another way, asking, “What do we fear is lost when an item is not handmade?”

Here’s what I came up with:

It makes me, the maker less special.

The “touch” of the artist, the “hand” (is lost).

It makes the object less special.

Potential for unlimited “copies” devalues the object.

I’m not saying these are my views, I’m trying to figure it out — where that resistance to high tech methods is coming from.

In response to this one, I asked myself, “What would happen if we released that fear?”

Next, I asked “Should this item be handmade? (or, Why am I thinking of hand making this?)”

Possible answers:

fastest way.

only way I know.

handmade-ness is part of the idea of the piece.

technique cannot be replicated in a Fab-Lab method.

I want to emphasize the limited edition-ness of it.

(are those good reasons?)

I concluded that the Idea, Object and Method of Creation are inter-related:

The object still matters. We love to make ‘em, people love to wear ‘em, own ‘em. Sometimes it matters to some customers. It matters to me if it needs to be handcrafted to be in a specific show or sales venue. Beyond that, I’ve released the Cult of the Handcrafted.

Another artist who has released the Cult of the Handcrafted, in my assessment, is Jillian Moore, another speaker at the symposium. Here’s an image of her work, one of the pieces that was in the Shift exhibition.

Necklace, Copyright Jillian Moore

Jillian originally made these works by electroforming. In electroforming, you create a form in wax, paint it with conductive paint and then submerse it in a bath filled with copper particles and connect your piece with electric wire to attract the copper particles. (apologies for any inaccuracies in that quick description.)

She was taking these electroformed shapes and coating them with layers and layers of paint and resin. It doesn’t always show in pictures, but her pieces have a depth to them, created by those layers.

At one point, she realized it didn’t really matter if it was copper under all that resin. Sure, fellow metal heads cared, but did anyone else? Did anyone appreciate the laborious nature of the electroforming, the copper? She switched to using foam as the base of her pieces, which has the added benefit of being lighter.

This brings us to this picture:

How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

I realize that all of this can seem like a discussion of that question about angels and heads of pins, but it does matter, if we can’t figure this out within our industry/community, how can we present ourselves to the outside world?

Jillian is concerned about that — about how we’re perceived in the world in general as “Art Jewelers.” In response to a question from an audience member (the question was something about the DIY movement), Jillian talked about how she describes herself to the cashier at the grocery store, when asked what she does. She says she starts with “I’m an artist,” and might get more specific if there’s interest.

What she doesn’t do, she says, is say — now imagine Jillian saying this in a very snobby voice — “I make Contemporary Art Jewelry.” She advised us:

Jillian said that the DIY movement gives us a ready made audience we can connect with if we’re not dicks about it. We need to be relatable.

(I agree.)

On the matter of handmade-ness, if we’re honest, most of us are already not all the way to the left on the continuum. If designing a piece on the computer and having it 3D printed by another company is all the way over on the right, then over on the left is alloying the metal yourself, pouring the ingot and rolling out the metal before you even get started.

Most of us aren’t all the way over on the left. My primary method of making is having work cast from my waxes. I don’t do my own casting. That puts me pretty far on the right side of the continuum.

Why do I create anyway? Even if I’m not doing it “right” in terms of the handmade police?

Because I believe artists have an important role to play in the culture. We are the transmitters of culture, the commenters on it, sometimes we can move the conversation forward.

Sometimes how the objects that are the culture or comment on it matters, and sometimes it doesn’t. For a terrific example of metalsmithing work with cultural significance, look at the work of another speaker, Stephen Saracino, this is his Columbine Survival Bracelet.

And that seems like a good place to stop for now. The comments are open!

Karin Seurfert & Claire McArdle (Zoom Symposium)

Elaine — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:47:37 +0000

In her workshop at the Zoom Symposium, Linda Hughes shared two videos with us, this one, above, from Karin Seurfert of Berlin. And the one below from Claire McArdle.

The State of High Tech Jewelry

Elaine — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 14:30:39 +0000

by Elaine Luther

The Zoom Symposium was subtitled: Examining the Future of Craft, but we didn’t, as a group, actually figure that out or announce what the future would be. So I’ll be posting some of my conclusions about the Future of Craft right here, in hopes of getting a conversation going. Comments are welcome!

High tech jewelry – anything made with CAD, CAM, 3D printing, laser cutting – is still in its infancy. While there are exceptions (and please post those in the comments) I hold that the techniques, as used to create jewelry, are still a bit immature. Wait — not the techniques, more what we’re doing with them. The techniques themselves are well developed in many cases. We should still pursue the techniques though, because they are going somewhere cool and to avoid them is to be left behind at our peril.

The two primary speakers on tech in jewelry were Arthur Hash and Catarina Mota. Catrina covered the MAKEzine/LED light side of things.

What I’ve seen of the LED light category — the folks making these things, which are fun, but the making of them seems to be all about the “gee whiz!” aspect. Look! My ring lights up! Some day, we’ll look back on this the same way we look at the mood ring fad of the ‘70s.

The gee-whiz factor is high, it is cool. But the work is often poorly designed. Catarina showed us a video from MAKE featuring an LED bracelet made with industrial felt where the closure was made by slotting a battery into two slots in the felt. This was clunky and ugly. And impractical, as bracelets shouldn’t have a big tab sticking up with a battery sticking out of it.

I can forgive MAKE because it’s a how-to magazine and the bracelet project is in fact a useful exercise in learning to work with LEDs.

With tech jewelry, my criticism is that it tends to all look the same. There seems to be a bit of a tendency to make things that would be difficult to make with conventional metals — which makes sense in a way, why not exploit the technique to make it do what it’s best suited for?

But there is a tendency to make lots of “open in the center structures with connected lines” jewelry.

Or is it that I only recognize tech jewelry when it’s made that way? In the same way that some folks only recognize metal clay work when it looks blobby and clay-y and fail to recognize it when it looks awesome?

Arthur Hash, who teaches in the FABLAB at SUNY-New Paltz, while also having a strong background in metalsmithing, makes some laser cut enamels (laser cut!) that I wouldn’t necessarily have identified as laser cut. Those pieces are a combination of handwork, laser cutting and old school enameling technique. If I’ve read his blog posts correctly, the brooch frames for those are cast from an original he made.

(I’m super excited about laser cutting enamels and can’t wait to try that one.)

A questioner at the Symposium asked Arthur how he thinks of himself, which work he values more, the handcrafted or the computer-aided. Arthur said he sees both kinds of work as equally from his hand. (If you’d like to hear more about what Arthur says about being a hybrid craftsman, you can read or watch his six minute presentation from SNAG this year, here.

To sum up: I think tech jewelry is often made just because we can and that people haven’t yet figured out quite what to do with it. It’s sometimes ugly.

I wonder where it’s going? What should it be? What’s the best use of it?

What might we be missing out on if we don’t try it?

A Highly Subjective Look at the Exhibitions at Zoom

Elaine — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 20:22:54 +0000

There was a feast of jewelry and hollow ware to look at the Zoom Symposium at Indiana University. It was overwhelming, really.

Speaking of overwhelming, during a break I headed over to the campus art museum and toured the Ancient Greek/Asia section, the African section and then I was so full of art I just couldn’t take any more in. I almost didn’t go into the Western Art section. I forced myself and am so glad I did.

They have a treasure trove of work by women artists, including a tiny work by Gabriel Münter, a larger work by Elizabeth Vigee-LaBrun, a drawing by Suzanne Valadon and a Mary Cassatt print. I was swooning! So wonderful to see in person the works I’ve seen so many times in books.

There was also a Kurt Schwitters, a Kurt Schwitters! His work is usually reproduced in black and white, so it was so wonderful to see one in person, in color.

Now, on to the jewelry! There were nine exhibitions associated with the conference. I saw all of them that were on campus, but didn’t make it to the shows downtown.

I took pictures of the things I liked, that caught my eye for some reason. I admit to being jaded when it comes to jewelry. I’ve seen a lot. Lots of jewelry makes me go, “meh,” or “seen it before.” This post isn’t an attempt to be comprehensive or to review the show, just sharing what I liked and why.

Let’s start with the student work show. The student show included work by both graduate and undergraduate work and was labeled whether they were a beginning, intermediate or graduate student, which was helpful.

Mosaic Cream & Sugar, Copyright Alana Rhonemus

Alanna Rhonemus created this creamer and sugar bowl out of copper wire. I like that she too the non-functional bit to its absurd extreme.

Yeah Toast Ring, Copyright Abby Bowman

I asked a conference organizer if the toast goes up and down and they said it does. Making a hollow construction ring is often an assignment in a college metalsmithing class; I like that Abby took it further and used that hollow space inside the ring for something. And it’s cute and funny, I like cute and funny. Especially when it’s crazy difficult to achieve, such as by fabricating it from sheet metal.

Now on to the attendee exhibit! The vast majority of attendees were also students, accompanied by their professors. There were maybe ten un-affiliated folks like me. Work in the attendee show may or may not be by a student, but then again, it might be by a famous professor.

Apparently, I like tiny, functional kitchen ware. Look how perfectly made this is! I don’t know, but it sure looks like it actually could scoop tiny scoops of ice cream. (Sorry for the funny angle on this photo, I was probably trying to avoid reflections from the glass case.)

Next up, scissors!

“This is What We Do,” Copyright S. Eagan

I have that exact pair of scissors and do you know how hard it is to make an image like that in enamel? Wow. (I can’t quite read the first name in my photo of the name plate, I’ll email the conference folks and find out.)

This piece includes found objects and powder coating. The materials list says: vintage silverplate, brass, steel, wood, powder coat, lacquer.

He’s taken a found object and transformed it, which I also do in my work. However, he’s going in the opposite direction from me. I usually take something plastic and silver leaf it. He’s taken something precious (silver plate, okay, somewhat precious) and hidden that with the powder coating. We’re both commenting on preciousness and value.

And that’s almost everything that I took a picture of. More in another post. I exhibited my medal, Never Recovered in the attendee show.

If your work was featured in this post and you’d like to send me a better picture and/or provide a link to your site, please comment and/or email me! Thanks!

The Report from Zoom: The Future of Craft Conference

Elaine — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 13:35:32 +0000

I’m just back from the amazing Zoom Conference, hosted by University of Indiana in Bloomington, Indiana.

This is the introduction to a series of posts. Here’s the line up of speakers and teachers:

Arthur Hash
Charon Kransen
Jillian Moore
Catarina Mota
Stephen Saracino
Dr. Will Byrd
Nicole Jacquard
Linda Hughes
Rowland Ricketts

The students of the metals guild at IU attended a metals ymposium at East Carolina State University and were so inspired that they came home and got to work immediately on planning their own.

They put together a really impressive event, with nine (!) high quality exhibitions, you can read about those here, and I’ll be posting some pictures from the exhibitions.

While the students created and ran the event, I could also see the power of having an institution behind your efforts: university staff were also tremendously involved and supportive and the high quality graphics from the professional they worked with no doubt contributed to the overwhelming response to their opening registration!

The response was so great, that they added additional programming for the late-to-register.

What made this conference so wonderful?

An unusually diverse line up of speakers, in terms of age, methods that they work in, country of origin.

The exhibitions were similarly diverse and included an attendee exhibition, which was terrific. When you met someone, you could connect them with their work that you’d seen in the show.

The ambitious title was Zoom: The Future of Craft. I don’t think we settled the matter, but the conversation was terrific and it’s a conversation that needs to be happening.

In upcoming posts, I’ll share more pictures and more about what the presenters spoke about.

Join me at C.E.O. this month

Elaine — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 18:03:06 +0000

I’ll be facilitating two round table discussions at the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’Organization Conference this month. There are some special events at CEO put together by SEA, Self-Employment in the Arts, and my round tables will be a part of that. If you’re a college student, be sure to sign up! It’s a great event!

http://www.c-e-o.org/events/national-conference