You’re Invited! Radiant Echoes: The Metal Mastery of Victoria Lansford – 1989-1994
Welcome to the exhibition!
Introduction
Embracing Beauty
One of the most important moments in the development of my creative life is decidedly not a romantic one: I was still on crutches, awkwardly hobbling inside from the mailbox to the sofa clutching the Georgia State University 1988-1989 course catalog. My barely healed, torn hamstring had rendered me unlikely to keep dancing professionally, and I’d finally accepted that it was time to pursue my other love, visual art. I was astounded by the art department’s curriculum, which included nine courses in Jewelry Design and Silversmithing. I could major in this subject! With little more than a paper map to GSU’s downtown campus and my intrepid determination, I navigated my way through the bureaucracy of quickly getting accepted. Walking into the metalsmithing studio, I had absolutely no comprehension of the technical processes to which I would dedicate most of my adult life.
When people ask if I was born into an artistic family, my sarcastic (yet truthful) reply is always: “I come from a family of seemingly ordinary people who have done unusual things exceptionally well…and that’s not at all a recipe for a problem with perfectionism!”
I was born in North Georgia and grew up in Chattanooga, where everyone I met felt compelled to tell me of the wide-ranging accomplishments of at least one of my family members. My paternal grandfather held two patents for revolutionizing the carpet tufting industry. My maternal grandfather grew prize-winning roses. My maternal grandmother sewed clothes as well as any tailor. My paternal grandmother decorated family birthday cakes, piping icing roses better than the professional bakeries in town; her mother painted all of our birthday cards with kittens and puppies to rival Beatrix Potter. Their remarkable creative skills did not necessarily lead to creative living, however. Instead, they were bound in a tight, self-deprecating box of working and middle class values, covered by a thin veneer of Southern American propriety.
It was music, not visual art or engineering, that atypically wired my brain. My father was a concert organist and my mother taught jazz piano, as well as pursued careers in gifted education, then organizational development. In our house, the “Three B’s” were Beethoven, Bach, and Brubeck. Complex fugues and 5/4 time signatures were ubiquitous but practiced, as musicians do, in sections of endless repetition. As a toddler, I adored my mother’s Dave Brubeck Quartet records and their compositions, played with clearly defined beginnings, middles, and ends. I would dance around our den, imagining how all the other dancers in my head moved along with me (and my security blanket).
The surreal world of my home life existed within a larger context filled with the kind of hopelessly mixed cultural messages I received watching Walter Cronkite every night on the evening news: messages of hope and despair, equality and inequality, of shooting for the stars and racing to blow up the planet. I was born between the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. My earliest recollections of the world around me include the Apollo moon landings, Vietnam war protests, police brutality, Watergate, and activists proclaiming that people like me were autonomous and equal to everyone else. I wanted to be an astronaut. Although I learned that women could be whatever we wanted to be, that was only true so long as we wanted to be nurses, teachers, or secretaries.
The aesthetics of the 1960s and ‘70s left a permanent visual imprint on my brain. My senses reveled in the bright palettes and expressive shapes of graphic art, advertising, and television shows of the time, many steeped in a revival of Art Nouveau design. I escaped into the vivid colors and soft textures of Sesame Street Muppets and animations by Jim Henson, as well as the surreal worlds depicted by Maurice Sendak and the humor of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts.
I was five years old the Christmas when my parents’ music student Roddy Noll gave me an obscure board game called Voice of the Mummy. I can clearly trace my all-out obsession with ancient Egyptian art, especially the architecture and the metalwork, to this moment. As a child, nothing was more thrilling to me than a trip to a museum that exhibited ancient Egyptian art. Despite not seeing the exhibition, I studied every book about Tutankhamun I could get my hands on, diving into Howard Carter’s The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen when I was ten. The full story of Roddy’s remarkable gift, as well as my later trips to Egypt, became the basis for my book Giving Voice, perhaps my most ambitious project. I found great significance in the fact that two of the four Egyptologists players moved around the board were women. Even dressed in stereotypical colonialist khakis, those two female figures were my first evidence that women had – and could – accomplish things that were definitely outside the box.
By the time I was eight, my mother realized that my inherited finger dexterity (and complete intolerance for boredom) needed to be channeled into something constructive. Through classes or kits, she introduced me to almost every craft fad of the 1970s, including macrame, needlepoint, embroidery, tatting, leather working, candle making, furniture caning, drawing, and painting. While I begged to learn metalwork, it wasn’t on her list. My backyard playhouse, which I’d converted into an art studio when I was six, was a refuge from the madness of home. Roddy had given me a small, cube-shaped, AM radio, allowing me to spend time there listening and dancing to the music my overly serious parents had outlawed: rock, funk, soul, and disco (plus episodes of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater). Like most of us from Generation X, I took it for granted that the world might be blown up before I reached my teens; I coped with this terror and uncertainty by focusing on each present moment, listening to music and making things.
When my mother started graduate school, my godmother’s house became my home away from home – or rather, my studio away from the studio. Bobbie Jean Brooks Crow was an artist like no other. Her house was in an integrated neighborhood, and it was a home in which everyone was truly welcome. Bobbie loved both people and animals. She had a strong southern accent and an informal welcoming demeanor. She was left-handed and thoroughly right-brained. She would cook entire meals for a homeless person, wore fedora hats with denim jumpers and cowboy boots, sang in the Episcopal church choir every Sunday, and kept a hoarder’s house full of kitschy tchotchkes. Bobbie took everything in stride, and nothing too seriously.
Most importantly, Bobbie was an Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor. Through her eyes, I learned that feeling and expression were as important as the medium itself when developing a work of art. Under Bobbie’s tutelage, things began to make sense in my mixed messaged world. There was room for visual expression of alternative worldviews that sought synthesis, and went beyond mere duality. Through Bobbie’s wild line work, her intense use of color, and her adoration of artwork by Rothko, Kandinsky, and Dali, I saw all artwork had the potential to relate emotions and archetypes to the viewer. It could even echo the purpose of liturgical stained glass windows, telling stories when words failed. Though I could never reconcile a Modernist approach with my love of detail and precision, I cherished these influences simply because they required a different way of seeing that felt more in line with my own perceptions of the world.
Whatever Bobbie learned, she shared – and she would also ensure I had the supplies to delve into the practice on my own. When I was barely double digits in age, she taught me silverpoint drawing on gesso boards, how to stretch and prime large canvases with a gallery wrap, how to etch and print zinc plates, and so many more techniques before she decided it was time for me to elevate my skill set and learn to paint in oils. She dedicated a space in her living room for my practice, where I painted her Siamese cat awkwardly floating on a blue background.
Bobbie’s unconditional love and endless belief in me is not only why I became a professional artist, but also why I do not currently reside in a padded cell! When I entered art school, no one was more pleased than Bobbie. With few exceptions, my instructors during my formal schooling offered far less support than I had experienced working with her, even as I was afforded an immersion into a wide variety of fine art and craft media. Art school was paradise.
In college, my earliest attempts in metal were curvilinear, geometric forms either pierced from sheet or fabricated from wire. My main professor, Richard Mafong, was a stickler for good technique and hated anything even vaguely representational. In 1991, he visited the U.S.S.R. He invited Gia Gogishvili, a young metalsmith he met in Tbilisi, to become an artist-in-residence as part of the Georgia to Georgia program (a cultural exchange program between the state and what would soon become the Republic of Georgia). Meeting Gia was like having access to a time machine, a link to historical techniques that I’d previously been told were lost. With Gia in the studio, Mafong’s moratorium on representational work was lifted.
In 1991 the Cartier store in Atlanta held an exhibition of the jeweler’s early work featuring enameled boxes and cigarette cases in the form of miniature postcards and letters. As a result, Richard’s disdain for representation rapidly shifted, and he assigned the class trompe-l’oeil designs. We were expected to conceive of as many objects that looked like other objects as possible. I kept a tiny sketchbook with me at all times, scribbling ideas at traffic lights before the light could change to green. Although I never produced it, my unconventional notetaking inspired a traffic light shaped lipstick case with red, yellow and green stones down the side.
What I really wanted to make was a vanity case, similar to those women carried in the 1920s and which held face powder, rouge, a comb, and coins for cab fare in half the space of an evening bag. If Cartier had claimed postcards, then I would find another type of card. I schemed ways to make my Queen of Hearts idea look a bit more unexpected (after all, I was going for an A). I decided that a messy deck of cards with edges sticking out at random would be most interesting. The deck needed to be at scale – including the height – so I reasoned that a double box, divided into smaller sections to hold various cosmetics, would function more like the compacts from the 1920s.
As I plunged into the design of the top, I suddenly realized that if I was going for realism, the queen had to be figuratively dimensional without looking like a two-headed monster. I carved steel stamps to imitate Renaissance fabric patterns for her dress that I cinched at the shared waist. If a three-knuckle box hinge was frowned upon by ‘serious’ metalsmiths, and five knuckles were better, I supposed that maybe eight knuckles would be even better (they’re not!). I fabricated two rows of hinges, 16 knuckles in total, that were never as straight as they might have been.
I received an A minus.
Now older, wiser, and infinitely more compassionate, I painstakingly removed decades of tarnish to reshoot this piece for my exhibition. Each gentle swipe of multiple specialized polishing cloths revealed to me the intrepid young woman I had been. Making this box didn’t illustrate the arrogance of youth so much as my sheer drive and determination to take risks. I was hell-bent on rising to absurd, self-set challenges.
Each layer of grime that came away offered a surprise from that younger self. Crooked hinge mistakes aside, I found that everything was well soldered and neatly polished. I have no memory of how I supported those random card edges that stuck out, or how I soldered them to be so perfectly perpendicular to the sides of the box. The straight parallel lines, indicating the cards properly stacked in the deck, were my first attempts at engraving. The stones still held with no rattle, even the ones set by repoussé alone. I saw that I had, with much success, used only hand tools and an air/acetylene torch at the kitchen counter of my tiny apartment to pull off things that I know better than to try now.
In revisiting this piece I found that the biggest gift of all was my memory of taking it out of my purse the night that I was stalked and mugged on my way home from a very mundane errand to borrow a paintbrush. My intrepid young self held onto the purse strap and fought the attacker like mad until reality set in; as I let go, half the contents crashed to the ground. While the assailant ran off with my semi-empty purse, the Queen of Hearts was safe in my apartment. Eventually, so was I.
The young woman who persisted with the box could have had no idea what life and art would hold in the coming decades. If she had, she might have had the sense to be more afraid – and would have taken fewer of the risks that allow me to be the artist I am today. What has always survived across my years in this work, is my need to rise to impossible challenges – and my drive to turn chaos into order and beauty through the alchemy of metalsmithing.
As I have reflected on the works selected for this exhibition, which has asked me to traverse the foundational years in which I became the creative thinker I am today, one thing has become abundantly clear: I see that my life’s work has been a reaction against cultural conformity, and instead, a push towards embracing beauty in what remains a promising, but difficult, time to live and create.
Eastern repoussé cosmetic box (shown open)
Enter the first gallery room and explore Victoria’s artwork from 1989-1994
Click on the thumbnails for each piece. Full images and descriptions may take a few moments to load.
Radiant Echoes: The Metal Mastery of Victoria Lansford showcases the artist’s journey through over three decades of ground-breaking applications of historical metalsmithing techniques. This retrospective publication comprehensively not only explores Lansford’s endless ability with complex metalsmithing techniques including filigree, Eastern repoussé, and granulation, but also speaks to how her skill and vision marry in the creation of objects that filters tradition through a contemporary lens. Simultaneously an artist, alchemist, and shaman, Lansford brings together the familiar with the unexpected through creative work that rethinks the millennia-old practice of turning raw materials into precious objects.
The book features over 150 images of art jewelry, art objects, and large-scale metalwork drawn from across Lansford’s career as well as a comprehensive glossary of her techniques used, offering a unique opportunity for readers to explore the evolution of Lansford’s creativity and craftsmanship. Radiant Echoes will make a fantastic addition to the library of anyone who loves jewelry, sculpture, metalsmithing, or simply contemplating beautiful objects.
Radiant Echoes includes new essays by curators, scholars, and artists including Kate Bonansinga, Cynthia Eid, Rauni Higson, Elyse Zorn Karlin, Victoria Lansford, and Jane Milosch, with consulting editor Emily Zilber.
Full color, casebound, 186+ pages
ISBN 978-0-9821833-6-6
Ships mid-November, 2024
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