Art Review – Deborrah Daher

Deborrah Daher is doing something very interesting. She approaches fine jewelry with an artist’s sensibility, creating handmade, rough-hewn pieces balanced with fluidity of form in traditional jewelry categories like cuff links, earrings, brooches, and tuxedo pins. Fine jewelry, mass produced by machines, has the advantages of perfection and ubiquity. But Daher’s human touch, with its appealing irregularities bestowed on those same traditional jewelry categories, is comparatively compelling.

Daher’s appreciation for nature and dissipative structure result in textures reminiscent of strange, archaeological finds. The artist acknowledges how her background as a painter and ceramicist enables her to create unique jewelry forms, “I am caught by the idea that transcendence can be found in what’s common and small, awareness and appreciation can create a mysterious and strange beauty.” Daher’s aesthetic sensibility and her eye for fashion converge in a way that is unsettling—and this is what an artist needs to stand out. You don’t quite know where to categorize her work. Is it art jewelry, fashion jewelry, or fine craft? The ambiguity is what makes Daher’s work so exciting.

(Image credit, Meadow cufflinks in the Landscape Collection, by Deborrah Daher)

Notes from the Studio: Jewelry Experiments and the Intersection of Science and Design

I’m feeling a little stressed right now, so I’m using my blog as a pacifier. It’s just that I had so many plans this weekend but apparently my body needed to rest, so I slept most of the weekend. Now it’s Sunday, and I have internal and external deadlines to meet, so off I go.

Sometimes it feels like my art studio is more of a laboratory. I say to myself, I wonder what would happen if I used this avocado pit in jewelry rather than throw it away. Then I say to myself, hey what’s inside that avocado pit? I wonder what would happen if I sawed it in half. Hey! What if I drilled holes in half? At times, being an artist provides me with all the benefits and wonder of childhood.

So, last week I picked up the new issue of Seed Magazine. Apparently SEED is a science magazine. But in this particular issue they are exploring the collaboration of scientists and designers. Right now I’m reading an article about Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art and Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry. In the article, Design and the Elastic Mind Antonelli posits that the “emerging dialogue between design and science…play[s] a fundamental role” in the advancement of society. More specifically, discoveries in science and technology provide opportunities for advancement of the human species and designers make those discoveries understandable and palatable to the world. (I would add that journalists and the media also play a significant role in contextualizing these discoveries in ways that helps the global society adapt to change).

But the article I am most stoked about is Peter Ward’s Big Idea that the production of hydrogen sulfide, H₂S, in our bodies is a possible biological scar that provides evidence on how our proto-mammal ancestors survived periods of extreme environmental changes that resulted in the mass extinction of other species. It’s a fascinating read especially the part where [this part is not suitable for Vegans...please start humming until it's over] Ward’s theory builds upon Mark Roth’s experiments in which Roth exposed lab mice to small doses of H₂S. The hydrogen sulfide puts the mice in a state of suspended animation with very slow or no heartbeats, enabling the mice to survive cool temperatures that would normally kill them.

Last September the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote a story on Roth’s $500,000 award of the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur genius grant for Roth’s H₂S research. It was back in 2005 that Roth’s work came to international attention, and since then he’s been working with Ikaria, a private firm that developed from the research at Fred Hutch, as well as the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

What this means is Mark Roth has found a way to cheat death, and for the past three years he’s been duplicating his experiments on other mammals. His work is being produced in the context of advancing trauma medicine but you have to know that eventually, if he conducts successful human experiments, death, as we know it will become a thing of the past. I wonder what Juan Ponce de León is thinking right about now.

(Media credits: Design and the Elastic Mind video, courtesy of Coolhunting at Youtube, Dr. Mark Roth courtesy of MSNBC).

Random Thoughts On: Recycling, Ethical Jewelry, and Responsible Mining

Yesterday, I felt pretty good about my status as an ecoist: I rescued a bag of styrofoam from the office trash, and I’m currently shredding the styrofoam to use in a new batch of art beads. It’s amazing how smug and self-satisfied I can feel about some of my environmental decisions and how guilt-ridden I can feel about other decisions. For example, like Seattle’s famous Bus Chick, I live a car-free lifestyle. For nearly seven years I have been a member of the Global Car-free Movement, and yes, I feel pretty proud of myself. At the same time I acknowledge that living in a city with an excellent transit system makes all the difference. Still, there have been times (when I’m tired and just want to get home NOW, or during cold and flu season when strangers cough or sneeze near me, or when someone forgets to take care of their personal hygiene) that I threaten to not only buy a car, but to buy a big, gas-guzzling SUV, but then the moment passes and I remain car-free.

I fell into the car-free lifestyle accidentally. Seven years ago, I drove my baby Benz across country to relocate to the Puget Sound area. Shortly after arriving, my car had a nervous breakdown of sorts and went on to that great Mercedes dealership in the sky. I had to decide whether to replace the car or repurpose the money. Since I was in college at the time, and since there was a bus stop right outside my apartment, the decision was easy. Then, while working at a radio station, I interviewed a transit manager about their move to biodiesel. Everything changed for me when I learned about alternative fuels and how my decisions impact the planet.

They say when you know better you do better, and so I try to be mindful of my environmental decisions—especially in the art studio. I use a lot of recycled, found, and reclaimed materials in my work but one thing I’ve been struggling with is whether to use precious metals and gems. On the one hand, it’s a no-brainer because in general the public places a higher value on jewelry made with precious metals and gemstones. On the other hand, the whole purpose of being an art jeweler—at least for me—is to explore the meaning and methods of jewelry making. Part of an artist’s responsibility to herself and to society is to ask questions like, why do humans value objects made of gold over objects made of paper? And, what is the cultural history of gold and how does that cultural history inform current perceptions of the value and status of gold objects?

Questions like these led me to Contemporary Japanese Jewelry by Simon Fraser and Toyojiro Hida. In the book, Fraser and Hida detail the work of art jewelers who use common materials like paper and textile to make beautiful and atypical objects of adornment. My resistance to precious metals and gemstones is also informed by the cultural values of affluence and acquisition that reached a peak in the last half of the 20th century and was played out on Wall Street and in the bling aesthetics of popular culture. But the fact remains that all over the world, people desire precious metals and gemstones, in part, because they’re simply beautiful.

Acknowledging the tension between the social valuation of precious metals and gemstones and the environmental impact of my choices just made me sit firmly on the fence until last night. Last night I watched ABC’s Nightline segment on Cerro Rico, a mine in Bolivia. The segment detailed the dangers to teens and young men in Bolivia’s mining industry, and it broke my heart. I decided right then that no matter what it cost me as a jeweler (lost opportunities, lost revenue, lost status, etc.) I would do my very best to ensure that my art practice establishes and operates under ethical jewelry practices. I have a lot to learn, a lot of changes to make, and a whole new world of opportunities.

(Image credit, 190 E-class Mercedes Benz by Octane Magazine, Contemporary Japanese Jewelry at Amazon.)

UTC Time test

It is 3:52 PM PDT. This is a test to see if the time on my blog posts have been fixed.

Notes from the Studio: New Art Beads

Once upon a time I founded an organic perfumery and created lush, custom fragrances from organically-sourced materials. I still use scent in my art making. Recently I finished a batch of hand formed, felted paper beads made from recycled paper and colored with tumeric spice. The beads are in a rough state, and will go through several refining stages. But the great thing about incorporating scent in beadmaking is when you drill your beads, your studio is filled with beautiful aromas.

I plan to use these beads in a necklace that will be part of the CiDu collection, which I hope to debut by Summer 2008. In this necklace that I’m working on, I’m investigating ideas about symmetry and scale. In the western world, our aesthetic canon is informed by ideas of symmetry based upon the Ancient Greek world’s appreciation for symmetry and similarly scaled objects. Being a proponent of wabi-sabi aesthetics, I like to investigate the eastern world’s appreciation for asymmetry. In that vein, I began this necklace project by asking myself, who says necklace beads have to match in scale, and who says that a necklace design has to be symmetrical? (This is a version of the question jewelry artist, Micki Lippe asked in the book 500 Earrings. Lippe asked, “Who said earrings have to match?” She went on to create a stunning pair of earrings).

Speaking of great jewelers, Mish Tworkowski, who is one of my favorite society jewelers, recently debuted the Wakaya collection of aqua-hued jewelry inspired by his trip to Fiji’s Wakaya Club & Spa. Viewing the gorgeous colors in Tworkowski’s collection made me aware of how my former art practice in painting gives me an advantage in pairing gemstones and art beads in interesting color combinations. I’m inspired. Time to get back to work!