I
have been a full time artist working from my back yard studio for
about 13 years. My medium is polymer clay and I make beads and jewelry
using the millefiori or caning technique. I prefer to use “classic”
Fimo brand clay as the stiffness enables me to keep very specific
shapes as I am building my canes. I sell my work at about 10 craft
shows a year and teach about six or seven times a year throughout
the United States and, I’m excited to say, a new date in Europe.
I began working with
polymer clay while employed at a fabric and art supply store in
San Francisco around 1987. The employees were encouraged to get
to know the materials we were selling in order to better understand
and sell them to interested customers - and on one evening of experimentation
- Fimo was placed on the table. My boss owned a necklace from Martha
Breen’s company, Urban Tribe, so I began by making beads inspired
by her candy-like canes. I have continued to work in the caning
technique since that day and find the potential for infinate variation
so enrapturing that I’ve not really been tempted to work in
other techniques.
I began building canes
with bold graphic patterns and textile repeating patterns but, when
Judith Skinner shared her color
blending techniques, I found a new language in color. I work
intuitively and often use paintings as a source for inspiration.
I look at a painting closely and try to see the color relationships
other artists have used and then reinterpret these relationships
into blended sheets of clay.
I
build my canes fairly large (about 8 lbs and 4-5 inches in diameter)
and work from a carefully worked out set of drawings. Often it takes
me close to a month to complete a very elaborate cane with much
of the time spent mixing and remixing sheets of color blends. I
generally cut the original cane apart into several smaller canes
and modify each one differently, using a technique of “kaleidoscoping”
or mirroring. This results in a series of differently patterned
but related canes. I find working with number patterns and the infinate
nature of them incredibly satisfying and I’m fascinated and
drawn to the resulting complexity.
In the future I would
like to discover a way to translate some of my patterns into a 2-D
format which could be applied to textiles or paper. For me, this
would create a sort of circle in my interests as an artist.
For more information
about me, read about my trip to Europe
in 2003 and France in 2005.
Celtic Canes and Beads