Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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56 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 elegant when strung on a wide, flat, sheer ribbon of the same color. Removed from their industrial surroundings, the washers read like stones, ceramic, glass, or other more traditional jewelry media. Her synthetic materials, rather surprisingly and delightfully, often take on the look of natural materials in such a way. One of her more striking choices is a slightly-opaque, almost pebble-textured plastic. Light weight, incredibly soft and durable, Donald slices the material into different shapes, often singeing its edges into a bronzy gold outline. She rivets, layers and suspends it on constructed armatures, or, in the case of a series of earrings, fastens it with strands of nylon that are secured with wire wrapped around balled ends. A remainder item from a scrap bin, after it has passed through Donald's hands, resembles something organic like hog's gut more closely than anything man-made. Rubber and the aforementioned bicycle tire inner tubes are other favorites of hers, and can often pass for leather or even metal upon first (and sometimes even second) glance. SUMI TRACE BRACELET of rubber, nylon, oxidized silver; 15.2 x 15.2 x 5.1 centimeters, 2009. Not bound by laws of materials, Donald also is not bound by traditional ways of making or even wearing jewelry. Her designs are thoughtful, architectural, engineered, and often surprising. Many pieces are large, taking full advantage of the "body friendly" aspects of her materials—fluidity, suppleness, weightlessness. They could easily be sculptural objects just as much as wearable ones. One of her more interesting, conceptual designs is a ring with no band. Made from decorated plastic orbs spaced out on a clear tube, the ring is worn by slipping your fingers between the orbs, one resting above your fingers and one anchoring the object in your palm underneath. Another bracelet—still in the experimental stage—incorporates dyed nylon strands with balled ends that Donald "ties" together with wire or rubber into different trapezoidal compositions. The individual strands slide along each other, creating different openings where a wrist can slide in. Sitting on the table, they look like atomic models or something made from 1980s Construx or K'nex toys. On the body, they are playful and fun, kinetic and dimensional, particularly when a few are layered together. Donald's materials drive the work and the composition like building blocks. Her process seems to be cumulative and instinctual, a sort of subconscious designing in response to the particular material at hand. In another new development, small rectangular cuttings of black rubber inner tube are woven onto individual dyed nylon strands, which are in turn woven and anchored together, eventually becoming a kind of futuristic fabric that will encircle the wrist in bracelet form. The very free-form element to her craft, and her endless trials with new substances and techniques, makes for a rather stimulating, varied body of work. Individually, her pieces each say something, about their materials, their maker. Collectively, the work reads like a stream-of-consciousness visual diary into the creative mind of Donald. While this may strengthen her position as a singular artist and jeweler, from a purely business and financial standpoint, Donald's methods are not without their challenges. She just returned last year after a long hiatus from the show circuit, attending both the Philadelphia and Smithsonian craft shows. Prior to that, she exhibited at various galleries over the years, but tended to shy away from craft shows, finding that her body of work did not lend itself well to the kind of presentations jurors want to see for entry. "I'm interested in so many different things and it was really hard for me to focus enough to have a comprehensive presentation of one body of work," she explains. "If you see a lot of the work, you can follow the threads very easily. But putting together