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…
The last 7 months have been an epic adventure into my own archive for my 35th anniversary retrospective. I’ve immersed myself in a world of tasks and decisions that surround bringing the legacy of my metalwork into accessible formats. As the big reveal gets nearer, I wanted to give you a glimpse into the process…
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…
Spring here is now Jedi season as baby barred owls Leia and Rey have emerged from the hollow in my neighbor’s nesting tree that looks like it was drawn by E. H. Shepard for a Winnie the Pooh story. Learning to fly is no easy task even if you’re born with wings. The landing part…
After becoming slightly obsessed with a chased gold cylinder from ancient Nubia that I saw last summer, I began experimenting with what I call micro chasing. I created this chased bead from seamless, sterling tubing (Rio Grande’s largest diameter). By slightly altering the order of Eastern repoussé steps I employ to refine my repoussé pieces…
