Jewelery Art and Networks by risa
Luzia Vogt makes broches like sea anemone from melted combs. She heats patterned gift wrap and then very quickly shapes it around gold spears, until it looks like a heavy flower in fat summertime bloom, though it remains very light. She collects silver coins from the 1960’s and thins and curls them into rings for your fingers, and also, into delicate, palm-sized bowls.
At her vernissage yesterday, at a little jewelery boutique and gallery on Laurier and Esplanade (in Montreal) called Galerie Noel Goyomarc’h Bijoux D’art, we jabbered shyly but gleefully to each other about the joy of disturbing and reclaiming something industrially produced, for art. Wide eyed and serious, but flickering between grins, she told me how she loved that combs, when they melted, turned into flowers or sea beasts, and how wrapping paper clumped like bright petals or lichen. I like to give large square, flat, men’s thirts extra folds and layers and ‘places where the garment gapes’, and I love to draw on them with thread and needle, making them more full of organic lines and small stories and smaller holes. So we had some interests in common.
She was also funnily apologetic about her website design, which is nice! and not at all really bad or anything. (I mean from what I can tell- there’s no English yet.) But we did agree that when you’re a full time artist it’s hard to also have the knowledge, time and/or money to get a nice website. Even harder to get/make one with useful functionality. If you were passionate about websites, you’d be making websites instead of broches and bowls. Not that I think the skills are all that different, just that the routes you happen to have taken so far are divergent, and it’s hard to be two places at once.
Anyway, it made me remember again one of the main ideas behind starting indyish: we thought that it would be good to have a nice jumping off place for independent artists on the web. That if we could make a healthy, symbiotic space to start from, more of the creative folks we know would come online, get used to posting on the web, get excited about their own site idea, make their own successful sites and link to us, and continue to expand the positive network effects of having roots in that community.
I invited Luzia to become an indyish member, but I’m not sure she will. People want and need different things from the web at different times, you know? And you can never really predict what might make a person think they do or don’t want to add one more factor to their lives. But it kind of doesn’t matter. We had a happy human interaction, and so we’re already loosely linked (plus we have a friend in common)- we’re already of the same network, already experiencing the effects of being linked, and those will continue to play out in probably unpredictable ways for a long time, despite the brevity of our encounter.
i did actually manage to finish 4 shirts without wearing them first, and took them up to Local 23 on Bernard, which is a nice local artist boutique, and they accepted them! i love them and didn’t want to part with them, but would also be deeply happy to see them out loving life in the real world, on the back of a stranger or friend. i worked with dayna gedney, who’s an illustrator, designer, etc. i chose from her hand drawn and cut templates for silk screening, and she printed them for me, showing me how. I did some embroidery before and some after, so there’s interesting stuff that happens with layers. There’s a tree, an apartment building at the end of the road, a white ghost flower, and a drawing of a city block with the statue on mount royal, and the cross. The lines are comic, the building’s bend a bit like they tired out by the city. It’s hard to describe. When I get a chance, i’ll get pictures. cheers!
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