Mindbogglingly quickly, the Earth has made yet another trip around the sun, and so this month marks 36 years since I began my journey as a metalsmith. Somehow 16 months have flown by since I began work on my exhibition and monograph Radiant Echoes to coincide with my 35th anniversary. Radiant Echoes evolved largely due…
I continued my explorations of combining techniques in unexpected ways through the use of mokume gane and Eastern repoussé bound artist books of my calligraphic and collage work. My filigree increased in yet more dimension as I pushed those pesky limits of physics. I had given myself one big edge: producing and selling my Russian…
by Rauni Higson Victoria Lansford’s striking use of filigree to create complex sculptural forms evokes ethereal forces of nature, cosmic storms, and manifestations of the invisible threads holding together the universe. While I grew up knowing the Nordic tradition of filigree well and was drawn in by its details – domed shapes filled with endless,…
Books are wildly intimate things. Books can be funnels: small openings that lead into larger spaces. From the moment I open one, I sense an unfolding that draws me into a portal that expands my sense of time.
Creating books, however, has an opposite effect. Imagine starting at the open end of the funnel and having to compress all the information that narrows to the opening…
There is a crazy, and very wrong, idea that smaller things are faster to make, as if scale were the arbiter of time. True, super large artwork can take ages, but every time I move back to a small scale, I get to remember that tinier equals painstaking and exacting, which can easily take just…
After months of waiting, all is green again here. Kermit might have found green a challenging color to be, but I revel in my fully tree-canopied yard. I literally can’t get enough of looking up at the vivid blue sky through the lush leaves of my giant water oaks. Ok, so I’ve all but given…
When I was trading skills with my friend Rauni Higson in Wales this past December, the wonderful women from Little Metal Foxes asked me back for Tool Tip Tuesdays, this time to help Rauni give a studio tour. It’s a chance to see her incredible work up close in a relaxed setting. Enjoy! If you’ve…
