Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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marketplace thickness of which determines the color of the oxide. Out of this came Reactive Metals; no craft or jewelry market for titanium or niobium existed before this. As soon as Seeley started to work with these refractory metals, people began asking him to teach workshops, which he continues to do, charging only for travel, room and board while the sponsoring organization provides the actual facility. Robert K. Liu hile Bill Seeley and Reactive Metals Studio are now synonymous with the use by jewelers of the reactive metals niobium and titanium, few would know that at seventy, this bear of a man comes from a theater arts background at Michigan State University. He performed kabuki in one of the only two costumes made outside of Japan for this type of robust traditional theater. While in the Army during the Vietnam War, he made films, did radio, television, and was in that Asian country when the character portrayed by Robin Williams in the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam was also stationed there. In 1974, Seeley became a self-taught metalsmith making Southwest style jewelry; with this work and his GI Bill, Seeley was accepted at the metals department of the University of Kansas (KU) under Carlyle Smith, where he got his MFA, although he also worked with hot glass. While at KU, he became interested in titanium. At that time, the only material available was tiny scrap from aircraft firm discards; this is comparable to pioneer glass artists working with dichroic glass, who got their samples also from trash bins. Helped by George Brown of KU's Electrical Engineering department, they made a bench top anodizer for coloring titanium; voltage controls the oxide buildup, the Reactive Metals Studio is located in historic Cottonwood, Arizona, a town in the Verde Valley that developed as support for the copper mine in nearby Jerome, as well as for the gold and silver in their ore. Outside of town is the prehistoric Southwest Sinagua hilltop pueblo of Tuzigoot, with its revamped museum that has much ancient jewelry and is well-worth visiting. Titanium comes from rutilated quartz needles, which are crushed into sand and mined, in Russia, China and Australia. Because it is an industrial metal, it is only sold by suppliers in large quantities, effectively eliminating competition from others in the jewelry and craft markets. Seeley is thus able to provide refractory sheet and wire milled to B & S (Brown and Sharpe) gauges, like other metals used in jewelry. Since refractory metals are covered with an oxide when oxygen is present, they cannot be soldered; Reactive Metals carries fusion welders and a large assortment of miniature nut/bolts for cold connecting. Besides refractory sheet, wire, rod, disks, tubing, and precolored stock, findings and the anodizers to color such metals, they maintain an inventory of interest to jewelers and metalsmiths, including mokume-gane sheet and rod. This unique product, most prominently associated with Japanese metalwork, is made by Phil Baldwin, of Shining Wave Metals, who is a blacksmith and knifemaker (see Ornament Vol. 31, No. 4). One of their new product lines is Incra Rulers, which incorporate perforations or slots to enable accurate marking, which I use myself in the studio. Reactive Metals Studio maintains a website and has an online, downloadable catalog, but all orders are by phone, fax or email, ably and cheerfully handled by Deborah Allen Adair, Michele Bowers and Sharon Driver. ANODIZER SETUP along a wall in the large, airy and well-lit workroom of Reactive Metals Studio. Photographs by Robert K. Liu/Ornament. Above: BILL SEELEY examining a series of patterned niobium blanks that were introduced at this year's SNAG Conference. Adjacent to him is his Bonny Doon hydraulic press, part of the extensive equipment of his superbly equipped studio in Cottonwood, Arizona.