Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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41 ORNAMENT 38.1.2015 and a passion that you have to have. I realized she is in this for the long haul. She's a lifetime planner and a maker. You can see that in her jewelry and in the cabin on Whidbey. It's rare for a young person to have that much focus." Worden adds: "And she's also a really good designer. By that I mean not just her aesthetics. But making an earring that is a pleasure to wear and that looks good. She really is a shining star." These days Owens makes jewelry such as the Proteus Brooch Series, her felt pieces, the coffee filter seed pod pieces, and the reconstructed necklaces as ways to explore ideas about materials, form and function. But she also makes a production line that she sells online. She regards her production line "as a more accessible distillation of my one-of-a-kind work. But production work is often more challenging in a way because I have to consider the marketability of the work. If I care too much about marketability, I start to feel like the work sacrifices my artistic voice for the sake of sales. This is my greatest challenge right now as a growing artist, to make a living while feeling like my work has my voice." Her one-of-a-kind work, she says, is created in "a more intellectually disengaged state. I generally focus on process, meditate on the materials and try to think as little about marketability as possible." In mid-January Owens was thoroughly engaged with a design challenge given to her by the Whidbey Island art gallery that shows her work. The gallery was having a themed show called Pop Art, and had asked all of its artists, regardless of their mediums, to interpret Pop Art in new work. As a result, one worktable in Owens's tidy, sun-filled studio was filled with deconstructed parts of tropical colored, plastic-framed eyeglasses. Owens was arranging the bubble gum pink, hot orange, lime green, and turquoise plastic bits into earrings and other jewelry. Owens had never before worked with eyeglass frames. But she is always interested in a challenge. "I like starting out with disparate materials and seeing how well I can get them together. It's problem solving based on the material. That's what I like to do." CORONA EARRINGS of brass, sterling silver, formed, fabricated, 5.1 centimeters, 2012. Photograph by Rex Rystedt. THREADED COFFEE FILTER EARRINGS of used coffee filters, sterling silver, thread, 5.1 centimeters, 2011. Photograph by John McLellan.