The Life and Times of the Plume

I tend to work in wide arcs, which is to say, sometimes I start something, set it aside and then come back to it weeks, months or years later so that my own life, as it were, has seasons of its own — so that there is a winter, spring, summer and autumn to my creative work.  I used to think I wasn’t seeing design ideas through to their conclusion, that a design series needed to have a clear beginning and end, that once I felt finished, I’d probably never return to an idea again.  But that’s not how the seasons work in the natural world!  They come around again and again, blending with each other so that we cannot truly say when winter ends and spring begins, we can’t ever say when exactly summer will slip into autumn, and it varies every year!  I’ve stopped fighting myself in the studio in the past couple of years of my life.  I’ve let go of the idea that there’s a right way to do this, that I must have a clear conclusion to every series I start.  In fact, I want to set things down, start something new, and then find myself on a return orbit to that original idea.  I want to explore and then re-explore and allow for cyclical wandering.  It seems right to me.

While I’m on the topic of rhythms I want to mention I’m not sure I’d be aware of my creative rhythm if I were not so hyper-aware of the seasons and I think the things that have bound me so tightly to the seasons and created a strong comprehension of life rhythms in me is our hunting seasons as well as my gardening and growing (and preserving) season — the general things we do around here to survive.  In short, I’m not sure there’s anything that can restore natural rhythms in our bodies as well as being connected to and responsible for the growing, hunting or raising of our food.  Once we find ourselves busy doing this honest work, everything else seems to fall into place and even our circadian rhythms benefit from a simple obedience to the seasons.  We wind up for summer and then wind down again for winter.  Resting and living like the bears do.  We are mammals, after all.  Perhaps that’s too simple an outlook on life but…perhaps it’s not?  The harder I work at surviving simply, the more I slow down, the happier I feel.  But I digress, I meant to talk about jewelry in this post.

 The foundation for the pieces I am making this week is the original “Glitz Ring” I made in February of 2010.  This series has come and gone in my studio numerous times, incarnated again and again with fresh  inflections, in new arrangements, with ever evolving botanical motifs, under the guises of new names, but some things about it have never changed.  The design always holds a stone that is flanked with a flock of dimensional, hammer formed (usually anticlastic) and highly textured leaves and sterling granules.  It only seems right to come around to it again this spring, renewing the design in a way that matches the freshness of the landscape here.  I’ve taken this leaf form loosely from the first sprigs of green growth I’ve seen on the river, right down by the water edge in the shadow of the canyon wall where the snows have yet to melt.  There, in the cold and wind, something new is brewing and it looks like this:

I’m holding these pieces for an official shop update in the next week and a half or so — I’ll be more specific about the date and time in the days to come.  For now, I don’t want to stop to deal with listings and photography and logistics.  It’s so nice to be working on a batch of one-of-a-kinds again — it feels like being touched by the sun.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2017/03/08/12686/