Did you think this post would be about nature-inspired installation art?
Well, it is! Eight years before I began making natural stone jewelry, I was a senior at Allegheny College, finishing up a minor in geology and a major in fine arts. My concentration was ceramic sculpture, but for my senior project I took on the task of finding out how I would make art when I didn’t have a bunch of kilns and free clay at my beck and call. The first half of the semester I spent looking for and not finding a way of making art that pleased me.
Then I started smearing clay on the wall and embedding found nature objects into it.
It seemed so right to include short poems on the wall that went with the found object, so I did. I dove right into truth and simplicity and laid what I had really been thinking about all this time right out on the table for everyone to critique (an important part of the art courses, but the most painful part) When the senior show was put up, lo and behold, other people were touched by my work and it inspired their lives and it inspired me!
By pushing myself into a different medium, I began to really understand that all my art pieces had been about the wonder moments, the ah-hah moments, that I experienced in nature and that gave meaning to my life. I understood that at the core, my art was and had always been, about a search for meaning. Every piece was a part of me searching for the question and a part of me answering the question, and here, finally, the searching part of me understood the answering part and the work clicked with me. It clicked with others!
Our professors always talked about looking for the threads that followed through all of our art pieces and urged us to follow the trail the threads led us on. So when I started making jewelry, the echos of this senior project came back and helped me recognize that jewelry making held the same meaning for me as fine art does because both are about finding meaning in life through the wonder-moments I/we experience through our time spent in nature and and with the wild. Seem like a lot for river rock jewelry to live up to? Nah! That’s what it’s all about, baby!!