new work and galleries

I thought I'd do a post of what I've been up to lately.  Another piece where individual structures are interlinked to form a chain. For each link, I made an octahedron out of gold filled tubes, then added 8 long oxidized silver tubes to form another octahedron on the outside of it.  It took a while to get it right because so many tubes were ending at the same place.  Eventually I added a small round silver bead to separate the outer oct from the inner one, and that seemed to make it work.
The other thing I've been working on this summer is getting my work into galleries.  I traveled around and talked to places, and I've gotten a few new ones, so if you're in any of these areas, I hope you'll stop by and take a look:
Albuquerque--Mariposa Gallery, 3500 Central Ave, mariposa-gallery.com
New Orleans--Ariodante Gallery, 535 Julia St, ariodantegallery.com
Chicago--Pistachios, 55 E Grand Ave, pistachiosonline.com

Necklace "upgrade"

Back in April I did a post about playing with octahedra that had a square shape, i.e. that had 2 sides, in front and back that were basically squares with a long edge forming a hypotenuse.  I showed this piece, with the colored tubes acting as the hypotenuses.  I liked the piece because of the color, and because I liked the squar-ish shapes, but over time I came to think it was just a bit boring.  My work tends to be pretty minimalist, and I like that clean, simple look, but sometimes it's hard to find the line between simple and boring.
  I kept looking at the piece, and finally decided it needed  a change.  I wanted to break up the symmetry just a bit.  Actually all I did was add 5 more octs to the red section in the middle, but I thought it made the necklace a lot more

interesting.  And I guess I was proved right because I sent it to a sort of trunk show that I participate in, and it sold the first day.
  With that piece gone, I'm working on another one using the square octs with colored aluminum hypotenuses.  If it works out I'll post it when it's finished.

Engineering a piece 2.0 (5.0?)

 One of the reasons I write a blog:
When I wrote the last entry, I thought I was through designing this piece and now I would just finish making it.  But writing the post got me thinking again, even as I was making it.  Unfortunately I had made more than half the necklace before things crystallized, and I started over.
The top picture is the same one that is in the last post.  I had achieved firmness, but at the  cost of  closing in the "donut".  Then because the top of the donut was small I had a fairly long extra oct as a link between donuts.  I had said in the post that I didn't want to make a unit have 4 octs ( one attached to each end of the stone structure and a chain of 2 joining them) because that would be lots of short tubes, and would be kind of busy.  But the structure ends up with 4 octs in each unit anyway, 3 in the donut and 1for the link in between.  I realized that if I made the 2 octs that attach to the stones angle out instead of in, I could have a more open structure without the extra link in between.  I think the version on the bottom (sorry about the blurriness; I actually did use a tripod, but I must have had the camera too close) is cleaner, simpler, and reads bigger, although it's the same number of beads.  In general, I like it much better.

Engineering a piece

I thought I'd post something about the way I design a piece, which is a very slow, trial-and error process.  I've been doing more with my idea of a structure that goes back and forth between the hex-based structures for round beads and the triangle-based tube structures.  I've done several along the lines of the one in my last post, where the necklace is a chain of polyhedrons, going back and forth from stone shapes to tube ones. Here I wanted to vary that a bit, and create individual "links" that combined tubes and stone, and then join them together.  I started by creating the stone shape (what you see is actually the 3rd version).  At each end it has a triangle of 3 10mm tubes and that becomes the base for a tube octagon.  The problem, then, was to join the 2 octs together to form a round shape and then link those shapes together.   You can't join them with an octahedron, because in those the triangles on opposite sides point in opposite directions, whereas these both have their point on the bottom.  You could use a chain of 2 octs, but that would entail lots of short tubes, and I didn't think that was what I wanted.  So I simply joined them with 3 parallel tubes at the top ( that's the one on the left).  But all those parallels, as I should have known, allow lots of wobble--rectangles becoming parallelograms, etc.  In the one on the right I added 2 more parallels down at the bottom of the tube part, but still had the same problem.

    After some screwing around I realized that there was a way to make the structure out of 3 tube octahedrons.  If I changed the shape of the ones coming off of the stone form so that they touched each other, then you could have an oct in the middle because you wouldn't be attaching to triangles on opposite ends of it, but to triangles that meet at a vertex.  It makes the "donut hole" smaller than I wanted, but that's what I ended up with.  I think you can see that I've taken advantage of the flexibility in the stone part of the link.  The stone structures in the top and bottom pictures are the same, but in the bottom one they look longer and shallower than in the top one.
    Another issue is color.  I think it dates back to my rugweaving days, but I always tend to think that if 1 version of a color is good than 5 are that much better.  That is, If I'm using green stones, I want each iteration to use a different green.  In designing these stone-and-tube pieces, I've so far fought that urge.  For one thing, I think a piece looks less formal when it uses several colors than when all the stones "match."     Also I'm beginning to think that just because a piece of jewelry is necessarily small, at least compared to a rug, more cohesiveness might be good.  However, in this piece, just because the color brown is itself so neutral, I went back to my old ways and used several browns and brown-reds.

Rolling Bridge Necklace

One structure that I totally love is the Rolling Bridge in Paddington Basin, London.  If you don't know it here's a video link www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIl0bzyQD0.  It's a pedestrian bridge designed by Thomas Heatherwick, and it's just the most elegant structure.  I was telling a friend about it, and suddenly realized that it was a great inspiration for a necklace.  This was also a perfect idea because my husband and I are leaving in a week or so for a month in England.  We'll be up north around Manchester, so I won't actually get to see

the rolling bridge, but it still seemed just right to have a necklace inspired by a British structure.
  This one is  all octahedrons.  Like the bridge, it has 8 sections.  It's not quite finished ( I need to make more chain links, and I've ordered a hook clasp) but when it's done the clasp will be right where the chain meets the "bridge," That way you can hook it to just 1 end of the bridge and it will look like picture 1, or to both ends and it will be rolled up like picture 2.  The only way to get it to be totally straight like the bridge is to hang it upside down, like picture 3, but it's actually a bit long for that (around 7"), so that's mostly theoretical.
  I didn't initially plan on using the seed beads, but I was forgetting that if the individual octs are allowed to pivot any way they want they'll tend to hang with the longer, and heavier, beads down.  The bead

chains keep that from happening.  I'm used to using much bigger seed beads, but they would have made the strings of beads much too bulky.  Fortunately, FMG had once sent me a container of #15 beads in just the right iridescent gray, as one of their free gifts along with an order.  I almost didn't keep them, thinking  "what would I ever do with these tiny things?"  But it's hard to throw away free beads, so they were still in my stash, and worked out just right.
  That reminds me--if anyone knows of interesting galleries, artist, sbead stores etc. in the Manchester...Liverpool-ish area, I'd love to know about them.  Actually, our mobility will be pretty limited, as we'll be on a narrow boat on the canals up there, but you never know.