Interviews

Starting in May, American jeweler Jamie Bennett has a delightful show at Antonella Villanova contemporary jewelry and design gallery in Florence, Italy. It is an unexpected place for Jamie to exhibit his enamels given the rarity of Americans showing in European galleries. I applaud both Antonella and Jamie for making it work. Jamie has answered my numerous questions with thoughtfulness, and although I have known him for many years, I learned a lot from this interview. Enjoy.

Susan Cummins: Jamie, can you tell me the story of how you became a jeweler?

Jamie Bennett: Once I finished undergraduate school with a business degree from The University of Georgia, I began taking art classes there. I was thrilled with the freedom I sampled by taking painting, ceramics, sculpture, and jewelry. Though I had only taken one class in jewelry, the intimacy, the particular type of making, and these objects all appealed to me. And I realized I already had a connection, which perhaps instigated my interest.

For once, I had the great good fortune to see one of the shows featured on the blog in person. I wish this were possible for every interview. Mia Maljojoki presented her work with Galerie Spektrum during Schmuck week in Munich, guaranteeing a huge audience. It is important to see her work up close to become aware of the care with which she makes it. Also, there is a very tender feeling that photos do not capture. The necklaces are accompanied by videos of a close examination of skin—again, something that can’t be sensed via this blog. However, Mia’s answers give us an excellent opportunity to understand more.

Susan Cummins: Can you tell me the story of how you became a jeweler, including where you lived and went to school?

Mia Maljojoki: In 1996, after working in fashion for several years in Helsinki, Finland, I went to work at a summer camp in western North Carolina, USA. That summer, in the middle of the woods near Asheville, I started to make jewelry by braiding twigs and lining up stones. Wanting to continue transforming materials into ornament, I attended the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, studying under Professor Joe Wood. In 2001, I graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in small metals.

Jeweler’sWerk Galerie in Washington, DC is having a marvelous exhibition with Australian Sally Marsland this month. Sally’s show has the very long title Everything depends on what we would rather do than change. It is accompanied by a catalog that’s remarkable in its honesty and humor about making work and living life. I was delighted by it and by her answers to my questions.

Susan Cummins: Can you tell me how you came to make jewelry?

Sally Marsland: When I was 12 I obsessively drew house plans and elevations on 5-mm graph paper, carefully placing windows and doors and furniture etc. I decided the logical conclusion was to become an architect. I followed this through to university, and then fell in a huge heap part way through as it dawned on me that perhaps the obsessive drawing had been a symbol of something else. I was studying architecture at RMIT University in Melbourne, and after a year of depression, I started in the jewelry course there. I studied at RMIT for five years and worked with the late Melbourne sculptor Akio Makigawa (husband of jeweler Carlier Makigawa) while I set up my own practice. I studied for two years with Otto Künzli in Munich. Since 2000, I have been back in Melbourne where I work and live with my husband Stephen Bram, an abstract painter, and our two sons.

Jewelry has been filled with plant forms from the beginning of its history, and these forms continue to intrigue jewelers from all parts of the world. Fingers Contemporary New Zealand Jewellery was founded in 1974 by a group of jewelers in Auckland. This month, the gallery is featuring a jeweler intrigued with plant forms. In fact, she has a horticultural degree. Lynn Kelly is absorbed more deeply than most by the use of plant forms as inspiration for her work.

Susan Cummins: Can you give us the story of how you became a jeweler? Please include your geographical locations, schools, etc.

Lynn Kelly: My parents emigrated from Northern Ireland. I found myself very interested in jewelry while travelling to Britain in the early 1980s to meet my wider family. I cannot pin down any particular person or event that started my desire to make. Once I returned to New Zealand and attempted to get metal training, I realized that I was too old for an apprenticeship, and at that time there was no other formal method of training in New Zealand.

Julie Blyfield is intrigued with plant forms as many jewelers have been over the millennium. She is looking at Australian plants, and this gives her an edge on unusual shapes and patterns. Second Nature, her show at Gallery Funaki, is a very concise look at how plant patterns translate into silver.

Susan Cummins: Can you give us the story of how you became a jeweler?

Julie Blyfield: My passion for jewelry and metal began in 1976. I was training to be a secondary school art teacher at Torrens College of Advanced Education at Underdale, west of Adelaide, in South Australia. (Now it is the University of South Australia, City West.) Carole-Ann Fooks was my jewelry lecturer. She introduced me to working with metal combined with mixed materials, such as bone, shell, and casting.

For many years, I taught jewelry making in secondary schools while making my own pieces at home in my spare time. I lived in regional South Australia when I first started teaching, so I had plenty of spare time to pursue my interest and passion.

Next, I returned to live in Adelaide and went back to night classes at Adelaide College of the Arts and Education to learn a few more skills, including enameling, chasing, and repoussé. In 1985, I enrolled in an associate diploma in jewelry making and joined Gray Street Workshop, a jewelry collective in Adelaide. I began as an access tenant, and then became a partner in the workshop that lasted 23 years.

Platina, Sofia Bjorkman’s gallery in Stockholm, Sweden, has a fascinating program featuring mostly young and thoughtful artists. This month, Hanna Hedman is showing a collection of her work in a mournful exhibition called Black Bile.

Susan Cummins: Can you tell me about your background and how you decided to become a jeweler?

Hanna Hedman: I have always been creative. As a young child, I loved making objects and drawings. My family always encouraged my creativity,  even though they were not artists themselves. I started to dabble in jewelry by breaking my mother’s necklaces and reassembling them into what I believed were better versions. I was also a professional skier at a very young age, and skiing was a major part of my life for a long time. But, I always felt the need to express myself more with my hands. I made my first piece of jewelry while attending the University of Colorado on a skiing scholarship from 1999 to 2001. My work wasn’t very artistic at the start. I was drawn to the many possibilities of shaping metal. This is something that still intrigues me very much. My art life eventually superseded my sports life, and I haven’t stopped making since then. I work with jewelry for many reasons, but one is to explore jewelry’s direct relationship with the body.

Jeweler April Higashi runs Shibumi Gallery in Berkeley, California. She shows mainly local jewelers and American jewelers who make well-designed, wearable work. Her gallery is located in a retail/manufacturing area, and her living quarters are right above the gallery. It is a wonderful space. April has discovered a lovely maker named Maya Kini, who is having her first full-scale solo show, Silk, at the gallery. Maya brings a complex background to her work.

Susan Cummins: Maya, can you tell me about your background? Your place of origin? Your schooling? How you became a jeweler?

Maya Kini: I was born and raised in the Boston area, the fourth of five children by parents from vastly different worlds. My mother is Italian American from New England, and my father emigrated from India in 1957 to get his PhD. He decided to stay in the US after meeting my mother. From a young age, I was given jewelry by visiting Indian relatives—bangles, anklets, and fine gold chains. Adornment begins at a young age in India and evolves into a complex language of beauty, wealth, and status.

I studied sculpture and literature at Reed College and eventually wrote my thesis on the translation of Catholicism and its earliest dispersion into New Spain. I received my degree in Spanish literature in 2000. In 1996, I was introduced to jewelry making in Mexico, and that seed developed into further study, apprenticeships with other jewelers, and eventually an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. I received my degree in 2007 under the guidance of Gary Griffin (2005–2006) and Iris Eichenberg (2006–2007). Currently, I operate my own small studio that focuses on commissions, multiples, and one-of-a-kind pieces.

The National Ornamental Metal Museum is dedicated to the exhibition, collection, conservation, restoration, education, and research of metalwork. It is the only American institution that devotes itself entirely to this cause. They have started an exhibition series called Tributaries, which refers to the Mississippi River running next to the museum and indicates a meandering retrospective of an artist’s work. For the past few months, the museum has featured the work of Lola Brooks. Lola is a maker of traditionally inspired jewelry wrapped in untraditional garb. (Her recent interview on this blog is worth a second look.) As always, Lola is a pleasure to read and an all around smart contributor to the thoughtful pursuit of making jewelry.

Susan Cummins: Lola, congratulations on being chosen to design the AJF pin for 2013. This is only the third year we have commissioned a pin for our supporters, so you are among a very elite group that includes Arthur Hash and Ted Noten. Not too long ago, we had a pretty great interview for your show at Sienna Gallery, and you answered my questions then with humor, thoughtfulness, and intelligence. We covered a lot of territory at that time, so it may be challenging to come up with new questions. Let’s start with this—Where are living now, and what you are doing?

Lola Brooks: Thank you Susan. It was such an honor to be chosen to design the brooch for AJF this year, and it has been quite an adventure seeing it through. I cannot wait to pin one on my person!

Let see now … where am I living, and what am I doing? I have to agree that this is a great place to start. It has been a year of tumultuous upheaval and transformation for me in every possible way. After almost a quarter-century in New York City, the place I have long considered my heart and soul, I tore up my roots and moved to rural Georgia, about 18 miles (29 km) outside of Athens. Although the move happened fast and seemingly came out of left field, it was not completely capricious.

Dutch artist Lucy Sarneel is presenting new work in the exhibition Soulmates at Galerie Marzee in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, through February. Sarneel continues to reinvent her work while still keeping her signature use of zinc forms. This jewelry is fresh and colorful with a liveliness often missing from well-established artists’ work. She seems still open to experimentation and new ideas. Nice job.

Susan Cummins: Lucy, I understand that you studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, that you taught there for many years, and now you are about to become the head of the department. Congratulations. Many incredible jewelers have come from that school. Can you tell me what is the secret to their success?

Lucy Sarneel: I have taught in the jewelry department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie for almost four years with some short periods of guest teaching previously, so it’s not that many years by my count. The secret to the school’s success could be attributed to the emphasis on the working process rather than working toward the result. Developing ideas as a constant dialogue between the idea and the material. The attempts and the failures. The doing and reflecting. Thinking in possibilities and not in solutions. This way of working opens personal potential and ways of looking, thinking, and making that the student learns to rely on, making him or her an independent artist.