Artist's Statement

... absorb the wisdom that boundaries are not where we end, but where we begin ....

R.S. Heckler

My beginnings in metalwork and design were in high school, when for the first time girls were finally allowed to take shop class. Fortunately for me, the choice included jewelry making. Here began my fascination with tools in general, the rolling mill and torch in particular. It opened a world I had never seen or known of.

I began college as a science major, with a minor in metals and ceramics. At that time I was driven to finish college with a marketable skill, with which I could travel and support myself. I studied to become a Occupational Therapist which combined my passion for art & craft, with my curiosity and aptitude for science. I specialized in the area of cognitive, and visual-perceptual-motor skills. I learned about how things are perceived by the eyes, ears, sense of touch, and how they are remembered, recalled and integrated, as best as one can know these types of things. My training included task analysis, considering the component parts of tasks, their needs for sensory input and output, their simplicity and complexity, how they can be learned, how they can relate to each other, and the importance of practice.

For a long time this seemed a diversion from the soul of an artist. However, in hindsight it was a beginning. It broadened my curiosity and understanding about how and why we see and know colors, shapes, textures, experience motion, and some of how we create, retain and recall thoughts, objects and their relationships. These concepts and skills have carried me through many beginnings and have become an integral part of my jewelry design and fabrication process.

After seven years as a therapist I began again, with new career. I found my way to open a design and construction company. This nurtured my art and design hungers, and taught me ( by the seat of my pants ) how to grow and run a business.

After twelve years of being "married" to a growing business, I sold my interest in the business and began again.

With focused intention, I began training, and practicing to be a jeweler and metalsmith. I took a number of classes through local colleges, jewelry schools. and art centers. I trained with a number of metalsmiths/jewelers, as an assistant. I am fortunate to have studio at my home, where I have been working full time learning and practicing making jewelry, and developing my own style. I prefer hand fabrication, resulting in each piece being slightly different. I work to make my earrings strong in their design and light in weight.

Shape, texture, and movement are key elements in my design eye. Mokume Gane captured my attention early on in my training. Making and designing with Mokume offers me a creative and broad pallet of patterns and textures. Living on the valley floor surrounded by open space, and hillsides, enables me to watch the movements of the landscape, through the changes of light, weather and the seasons. The landscape offers me many examples of texture, and ways of movement, which feeds my inspiration to create textures and refine different types of movement in my work.

Designing jewelry for me is a process each time of beginning again. The page begins blank and then there is shape. When I begin to make a piece ( series ) is when the textures come in to view, I can't plan the texture on paper. The findings and mechanisms to create animation and movement in my pieces are worked out first in my minds eye for the aesthetics, and are then practiced on the bench until it can move and make the separate shapes and parts work as one.

I begin each day aware and grateful of the opportunity to make my living as an artist.

" The power of landscape to restore and strengthen a spirit, rests primarily on one thing: the receptivity to what it offers ".

R.S. Heckler