Thursday, October 11, 2012

Transfix Us With Love, Make Believe, and Dark Flowers...



































Transfix us with love.  --Joy Harjo from The Creation Story
 
As an artist sometimes I am just not ready, do not have the skill or concentration to embark on the idea that is waiting in the back spaces of my mind. One of these fascinations that has captured my imagination since childhood has to do with flowers.  My go-to-doodles were always magical, make-believe flowers, fanciful with bright red tongues and wild yellow stamens. To be honest they were a little psychadellic...and a bit phallic in hindsight.  I am fascinated with all sorts of things about  flowers:  how they move through their cycles and what exactly about them is so beautiful, which ones are my favorites and how to translate them into metal.

I decided to revisit the flower theme in my last two collections in a series of Dogwood necklaces. (See Fiore, a design from four years ago) I thought it would be interesting to capture the moment when the flower is in repose, just about to fall into decay and break apart.  

Wabi Sabi is a piece about the last part of a flower as it falls away, loosening a Tahitian pearl and tiny diamond.

Poetry is powerful; the words are short bursts of color, condensed into a sharp economy.  I like to think these dark flowers carry an ambiguous and mysterious poem all their own, completely open to interpretation as all poems are.


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