Embody

People ask, “Where do you get your ideas.” I always want to answer with a question. “Where don’t I get my ideas?” The reality is that I think in shapes, in spirals and curved flames. The tension of where they almost touch and the resulting negative spaces feel tangible to me.

In Embody I wrapped a Russian filigree structure around an Eastern repousse one. The structures echo the same tapering curves that are reminiscent of Arabic calligraphy and have the graceful intertwining of Art Nouveau motifs, but in this incarnation they are quite dimensional. I formed and tension fitted each tiny filler wire within the filigree frame to mirror these curves almost like a fractal in which the design is made from increasingly smaller versions of itself.

The idea that in many societies people are expected to do only one thing and do it well is claustrophobic. Being a rebel, who hates being pigeon holed makes me continue to specialize in more than one technique and more than one medium. A big part of the fun of metalsmithing is to combine processes that no one else does (yet).