Interviews

Karen Gilbert is a designer, jeweler, mother, wife, partner in a glass business, and gallery owner. I don’t think she can fit one more thing on her plate. She is having a show with Shibumi Gallery, where owner April Higashi is pretty much in the same boat. How do these women do it…and do it so well? In this show called Shift, Karen has shifted the look of her jewelry to a simpler, more colorful style.

Susan Cummins: What is the story of your journey to becoming a jeweler?

Karen Gilbert: I became a jeweler by accident. I was a student at California College of Arts and Crafts in the painting department when I took an elective in the metals department and became mesmerized by the material of metal. I loved drilling it, sculpting it, torching it—all the tactile qualities appealed to me. I switched my major, and at the same time, became involved in the glass department. The two materials had the immediacy that I needed. I love to work quickly and to respond to my materials as I am working. After school, I worked for numerous jewelers, and that led me into creating wearable pieces. I loved that people actually wanted to buy and wear what I created, and that the relationship of maker and collector really gives meaning to art.

Ruudt Peters is a force. He is everywhere, it seems, with an irrepressible energy. He lives in Amsterdam, but you can find him in Mexico, India, Sweden, China, and numerous other places on a regular basis. You could even find him on the AJF jury recently for the Artist Award. Over the years, he has made it a habit to investigate cultures unfamiliar to him when he was ready to start a new series of jewelry. His curiosity drives him to learn about the spiritual inclinations of each place and come up with a way to express it. He is adventuresome, and with each series he changes the idea, the medium, and the technique he uses to make his jewelry. It is a bold way to work. This new show at Galerie Rob Koudijs is a result of his trip to China and his research about Qi.

Susan Cummins: Please explain the Qi project.

Ruudt Peters: Qi is the energy of life. It is Chinese alchemistic knowledge. I traveled through China for three months in order to be in touch with the Chinese alchemy of Qi. During my stay, I found out that there is a big difference between the East and the West in their approach to life. The Chinese are more holistic in their view of life/health and the mind/body relationships. Chinese alchemy is a mixture of Taoism, herbal medicine, acupuncture, and tai chi. It is based on real life. I tried to get all these influences and ideas into my work. I got crazy about it, and so in the end, I decided to make a blind drawing daily. It was a way to keep the memories alive. 

For two months, I traveled around the country researching, and then for the last month, I stayed in Xiamen at the Chinese European Art Center (CEAC). During that time, I worked with ceramicists and stonecutters who took the blind drawings and began to laser cut and etch the stone into brooches. By the time I left, the project was halfway finished, but I continued to work on them from Amsterdam through emails and translations. Also after I came home, I worked out how to treat the 99 individual ceramic men who represented the body experiences of acupuncture, cupping, stone massage, goose bumps, anxiety, crying, craziness, affection, and other feelings. Then, I went back to China for four days to work on the figures to make each one feel like an individual. Then, I had all the work shipped back to me, and when they came, I was even surprised by how they looked.

Henriette Schuster is a quiet jeweler, and the title of her show at Gallery Funaki Almost Invisible is perfect. She makes simple pieces with delicate domestic references or pure abstractions. There is nothing big or boisterous about her or her work. It is just humble, quiet poetry.

Susan Cummins: Henriette, what is your story? What compelled you to become a jeweler, and what was your path to learning how to do it?

Henriette Schuster: I have known I wanted to be jeweler since the age of six or seven. My grandfather built pianos, and I used to watch him at work when he handmade the keys using ivory, ebony, felt, bone, glue, and shellac. He didn’t say much, but one day he handed me a pair of his working pliers and a piece of wire. It was here that I began making jewelry.

I went against my parents’ wishes by dropping out of my studies in architecture and following the recommendation of Hermann Jünger to take up training in gold- and silversmithing at the renowned Neugablonz Fachschule für Glas und Schmuck (Neugablonz College for Glass and Jewelry). After completing my degree, I was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as one of Otto Künzli’s first students in 1991. I graduated in 2000. Simultaneously, I have worked in my own studio in Munich since 1988. 

Warwick Freeman is a New Zealand jeweler who is widely recognized outside of his country. At Schmuck 2013 in Munich, he was the featured master with a case devoted exclusively to his work. In 2002, Freeman was awarded both the Françoise van den Bosch Foundation award and The Arts Foundation Laureate Award. An exhibition of his work called Given travelled to Amsterdam and around New Zealand museums in 2004–2007, accompanied by a catalogue with text written by Damian Skinner. And besides all that, Freeman was a partner in the well-known contemporary jewelry cooperative Fingers, which opened in 1988. His street cred is excellent. This show with The National gallery in Christchurch, New Zealand is a mini retrospective of his work.

Susan Cummins: How did you learn to make jewelry? What attracted you to it?

Warwick Freeman: I usually make the claim that I’m an autodidact because I never went to an art school or attended any type of jewelry course. It’s basically the truth, but that belies the actual story which involves myriad contacts with workshops concerned with both the manufacture of the industrial and art. Learning tricks, observing ways of working—learning the habits of making.

But, when I think about the moments I developed some of the distinctive characteristics of my practice, I think I was probably alone, finding my own way by trial and error. I think that experiential learning was actually one of the things that attracted me to jewelry making, the workshop part of jewelry making anyway.

Willemijn de Greef’s summer show at Galerie Marzee in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, just ended, but I wanted to know more about the large gem-shaped ceramic brooches she produced and about her thoughts on work she has done in the past. In particular, a large gold earring AJF featured in the show Geography has always intrigued me. The story behind it is very moving. I am impressed with the large scale of Wilemijn’s jewelry and the interaction she has with folk traditions.

Susan Cummins: I understand that much of your work relates to where you grew up in Zeeland, The Netherlands. Can you describe it?

Willemijn de Greef: Only Weefsels, the collection of work I made for my graduation, and Zeeuwse knopen, some rings that I made before my graduation year at Rietveld Academy, are related to Zeeland (Sealand), a region in the south of The Netherlands. My parents and I moved there when I was seven years old. It was the beginning of the 80s. I remember the 70s craftwork of my mother decorating the house, some macramé pieces and several ceramic objects. I’ve combined my love for craftwork with traditional costumes from that region. The shapes are free interpretations of the jewelry worn with the costumes. I’ve enlarged them to create the link between the jewelry and the costumes. I also love the small mistakes and flaws in handcraft. As jewelers, we are always working in detail, erasing as many errors as possible. I love those tiny mistakes. I like to make them visible.

Heidi Lowe Gallery is located in the beach town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and has an active program of exhibitions and classes taught by the owner Heidi. In July, Jessica Stephens, a recent graduate from State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz was the featured jeweler. I think Jessica’s answer to my first question is very telling. Why aren’t students being asked to consider the wearer? Has education swung too far in the direction of self-expression that the wearer isn’t considered in academia? After all, the wearer provides both the end site and the reasons for making jewelry in the first place. I was grateful for Jessica to bring this up in her interview. She is an articulate maker and someone to watch in the future.

Susan Cummins: Jessica, you have been out of school now for about five years. Since graduating from SUNY New Paltz, have your ideas about making jewelry changed?

Jessica Stephens: I definitely think more about wearability. I think about the viewer’s and the wearer’s perception and if the pieces are accessible to a broader audience. In graduate school, you are gifted with an educated audience, a group of people who are intense and invested in the same manner as you. Once you leave that world, you realize how different the value system of the general public is, especially with regards to jewelry, craftsmanship, and invention.

Linda MacNeil makes jewelry using glass and metal, which gives her amazing control. By using glass and creating jewelry, she crosses over the material lines and appeals to both glass and jewelry collectors. Well established and collected by many museums, Linda joined with Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to concentrate on Brooches, the title of her new show. The variety of style, color, and form is pretty remarkable.

Susan Cummins: Please give us some idea of how you became the unusual combination of a glassblowing jeweler.

Linda MacNeil: To clarify, I don’t do any glassblowing. I work with glass in various ways to create specific parts and shapes and colors or to make solid masses of stock, which I can cut and grind to fit the metal parts of a specific piece.

I was experimenting with acrylics in 1972–73 when I met Dan Dailey, who showed me that glass can be an artist’s medium. Glass has diverse optical properties, an infinite range of colors, it can be similar to gemstones, similar to opaque minerals, similar to metal, yet it is unique. Glass is both ancient and contemporary.

Why do you make jewelry using glass?

Linda MacNeil: I have control over the color, the texture, and the quality of light falling on or passing through or refracting within my work. It is also completely my own, unlike a purchased gem or a custom stone.

Helen Britton has been very busy in the past couple of years, preparing an exhibit at the Neues Museum in Nürnberg, Germany, collaborating at FORM in Perth, Australia, preparing for gallery shows, writing for AJF, and so forth. How she also had time to pull together this show for Galerie Rob Koudijs in Amsterdam I will never know. Helen is a whirlwind. She is also one of the most professional and thoughtful artists working.

Susan Cummins: Helen, can you explain Heterogene as the title of your current show at Galerie Rob Koudijs?

Helen Britton: Heterogene is really from the word heterogeneous and refers to the diverse preoccupations in my work. The exhibition at Galerie Rob Koudijs includes, more or less, five different sections, one quite unrelated to another. There are the Dekorationswut pieces; a new drawing sequence that is autonomous but related to the Dekorationswut theme; a selection of the Industrial works, including what I am calling the New Industrial Gardens; as well as two major archival brooches. Then, there is The Big Ear, and of course a presentation of the Jewellery for T-Shirts project with Justine McKnight. It’s a pretty diverse show, and the first time I have presented so many different groups together. I usually have solo exhibitions where I just show one body of related work.

Sienna Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts is presenting new work by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray called Something for the Table. Myra has been a professor at State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz for the past 20 years and a master metalsmith with numerous awards to her credit, including a 2012 United States Artist Fellowship. As the gallery notes explain, “deliberately tentative, this work investigates fracture, explores gesture, and embodies utilitarian notions, suggesting a return to the table.” Myra is articulate and very funny as well as a force to be heard. She is entertaining and challenging at the same time.

Susan Cummins: You are a forceful person and seem to have been born fully formed out of the head of Vulcan, but the baby Myra must have had a journey to get to your position of great silversmith and professor. Can you tell me how that happened?

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray: Wow Susan, that’s quite the lead in! I do have a thing for hammers, and as far as force, well, that’s probably the result of having four older brothers and parents who made physical labor into educational projects—fun for the whole family. In the 70s, we built a house together, and I was assigned the task of straightening nails for reuse. It turned out I was pretty good at it. The baby Myra wanted to be a painter and set out for art school. As it so often happens, the class I wanted was full, so I got stuck in a jewelry class. The bug bit, and that was that.

But really, the crafts were in me at the start. I recall sticking pins into dolls’ ears as a child, and I was a self-taught macramé artist, which resulted in some pretty awful jewelry. Camping trips prompted a fascination with technical planning, problem solving, teamwork, and modes of efficiency that inform my working methods today.