Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
Issue link: http://ornamentmagazine.epubxp.com/i/104373
48 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 RACHELLE LIM, San Diego State University. Vilhena, who teaches metal art and jewelry at the Oslo National Academy of Arts in Norway. Vilhena invited her to participate in a workshop in Oslo, and there she met Michael Rowe, a professor at the Royal College of Art, where she recently completed her master's degree in Applied Art. She describes the Salzburg workshop setting as "a beautiful, old salt factory in Alte Saline," where everything "was rusty and worn out and the air was slightly humid and salty." She particularly was struck by the factory's patina, and created works "based on the beauty of aging." Lee remains drawn to the sensual, tactile qualities of jewelry and now is focusing on "the idea of weight in relation to touch" and how the body becomes used to the weight of jewelry and how jewelry adjusts to the temperature of the body. One of the first Windgate Fellows, Rachelle Lim (2006), recalls her fellowship period as a time when she longed "to define [her] own identity as a contemporary Chinese-American woman" because of the tension between her parents' traditional Chinese values and her own American viewpoints. She began her fellowship by attending a SNAG conference in Chicago, then stayed in that city to research its Chinatown. She also traveled to Chinatowns in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where she grew up. She felt particularly at home in San Francisco's Chinatown, where many people speak the same dialect of Chinese as her and where, for the first time, she visited her grandfather's grave, located in the oldest Chinese-American cemetery in San Francisco. Through her research she developed not only a better understanding of her family's heritage, but deep interests in traditional Chinese funerary and mourning practices and China's one-child-only rule, which led to an interest in female fertility. She combined these influences in her Lost Girl Urn, which features traditional Chinese mourning symbols and colors and references female reproductive organs. She recalls, "Some of the issues I had researched were hard for me to confront, but I felt were important social issues in the metalwork and jewelry I wanted to make." Now she works as a senior jewelry designer for a company in Los Angeles, and her fellowship experiences continue to shape her work. Aram Choi (2008), who attended SOFA Chicago and SOFA NY during her fellowship, works as a senior designer for a large costume jewelry importer company in New York, and while she has little time for her studio practice, she considers her artistic background beneficial to her current work. She views contemporary costume jewelry as having "no boundaries" and seems to relish the constant demand for new designs; with each product she originates concepts and makes designs and oversees them through their mass production in China. Also interested in the mass production of jewelry, Erin Rose Gardner (2007) spent four months working with Shanghai University's jewelry program and traveled to jewelry processing ELIZABETH STAIGER, Cleveland Institute of Art.