I like to do figure drawing when I can, just for its own sake. I paint and have made sculptures, but these are my first ideas about wearable art and jewelry.
The first piece of jewelry that really spoke to me was in a museum in Richmond, Va. It's an ear of wheat made of gold, from Greece in the 3d or 4th century B.C. It’s still perfectly fresh.
The cardboard construction by Rauschenberg at the Speed Museum in Louisville strikes me in a similar way. It’s not simply made from found materials—it incorporates printed representations on cardboard and paper of things that are printed on cardboard. I think it’s super-realist in an inventive way, more like super-realist fiction in literature than what’s usually called called super-realism in visual art.
They’re both elegant and playfully executed, but primitive and very direct in conception. I like that, and I try to keep it mind when I make things.
Fred
These miniature record earrings are my first jewelry pieces.
I’ve been playing with digital photo miniatures, mostly of vintage media objects like newspaper racks, books. I keep trying to make little piles of junk mail, but can’t seem to get what I want from it, yet.
I was looking at old vinyl records at an antique shop, and thinking what touching objects they are, so evocative of lived life, the fragility of it, and they have that gleam—which is just from how the recording medium works, but it seems so poetic. I wanted to try to get that effect, and tried a lot of different things before I felt it worked.
Cardbird II Robert Rauschenberg 1970-71