Residence

Seattle, WA, USA

Place of Birth

Middleburg, VA, USA

Personal Statement

I am a fine craft artist, a maker of jewelry.  My current work focuses on giving my own modern twist to the centuries old art of making wealth easily portable in the form of precious metal chains. I was immensely fortunate to grow up learning to make things – bread, clothes, buildings, art – and I take pride in being a maker in the tradition of generations of people who lavishly and richly adorn the items of everyday life. My jewelry is meant to be touched and worn, and can only be fully enjoyed and appreciated if the hands are involved as well as the eyes. Comfortable to wear all day, my work drapes smoothly on the body and invites the wearer to fondle and fiddle with it, twisting the individual rings and flexing the chains.

I believe that the craft arts have immense value.  They are the best and finest expressions of that alliance between big brains and opposable thumbs which catapulted humans into first place in the race of evolution. Fine craft is living art, it comes down off the walls and invades the supermarkets; it goes out into the world to make every day artful and special, and it invites people to join the community and become makers themselves.

Making things by hand is hard, and it is an awesome feeling to have the power to animate the recalcitrant energy of wire and manipulate it into metal chains so completely flexible and smooth that they feel organic, almost alive.  I enjoy the physical process of making jewelry, and relish the careful planning and mathematical groundwork required to make the myriad parts fit together perfectly.  My pieces are complicated, but decades of handwork practice mean that I can quickly enter that meditative moment when there is a seamless connection between hands and brain, and I no longer consciously think about each step; it just emerges naturally from the rhythm of the work.  The internal quiet of such focused work is refreshing, relaxing, and a fertile source of ideas.

Biography

I was born in rural Virginia, in the United States, and moved with my family when I was 8 years old to the even more rural Quaker community of Monteverde in the cloud-forested mountains of Costa Rica.  In this remote dairy community, we walked barefoot to school, hauled goods and people on horseback, and thought nothing of cooking dinner on a wood stove when the erratic electric power was out.  There were pie socials, building bees, few cars, no TV, and all the Christmas gifts were hand-made.  If things broke, you fixed them, if you needed something you didn’t have, you created it out of what you did have.  For me, the legacies of this up bringing are a delight in the engineering puzzles of inventing and building, and a loving patience with the general processes of making things.

My business, Flying Fox Jewelry, is named for the flying foxes (giant fruit bats) of Western Samoa, where I spent 2 years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and where flying foxes have been hunted almost to extinction. I hand-raised and released 2 orphaned flying foxes, and became a fan and champion of bats as a result. Generally misunderstood, bats, like art, are often considered expendable.  Though we finally understand that bats sustain the forests through pollination and seed dispersal, we are still trying to get a similar grip on the value of art.  The bats hidden in Flying Fox Jewelry are there to remind the wearers of the secret joys of self-adornment.

Awards and Honors

2008   Materials: Hard & Soft Exhibition, GDAC, Denton, TX
         Juror’s Award - "Tapered Square Byzantine Necklace"

Contact Information

flyingfox@speakeasy.net

Representation

Stonington Gallery                                         Seattle, WA
Bainbridge Arts & Crafts                                  Bainbridge Island, WA
San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design Store   San Francisco, CA
Collage Gallery                                              Calgary, AB, Canada
Gust Gallery                                            Waterton Lakes, AB, Canada