Reflect and Present

I’ve never been particularly good at talking about myself, but I did used to journal when I was a kid. I don’t remember much about it, except for the fact that it was mostly nonsensical stream-of-consciousness.

When I was designing my cover page for my presentation, I got stopped up. I always get stopped up when it comes to intro imagery, cover pages, even display. It’s an issue I had when I was an arts major moving through three different colleges, when it came time to display my work, it was always difficult to think about this, because I believed that the work should speak for itself. Tall shelf? Low shelf? Left wall casing or right? It usually didn’t matter to me. Background color, choices like these have always been difficult. So I will leave this background space blank, like my presentation.

I love the play between space and letter form, as do many designers. I love blocky letterforms because the negative space can be so clearly identified, such as the arrows created when the word reflection is reflected as if in a pond. It is a literal representation of the theme, and suggests the importance of looking backwards sometimes in order to move forward. The imagery is a depiction of how we see as humans, light reflects color and image to us and we perceive it. These felt like simple ways to convey my message.

I was born in Worcester MA, December 23, 1989, and moved to Medfield in 1990. I was born and raised there, and it was a beautiful place. My family and I lived on 20 acres of land and having the space to explore as a child was an incredibly luxury. I played a lot of sports, soccer and swimming were my bread and butter though, and I played and swam for several state teams, even swimming several events at the US Nationals when I was 15. Everything changed for me a year later, and I have to stress that this wasn’t an entirely bad change, just an unexpected one. I had grown up with incredible knee pain through adolescence and into my teenage years, and this eventually lead to the discovery that I would need both knees operated on if I ever wanted to be active again. Fast forward through over a year of recovery and rehab, and I had made a full 180 towards the arts. I had always loved to paint and draw, but it was my junior and senior year of high school that I really fell in love with my practice, and decided to major in art in college.

Boston University was my first choice, I applied and was accepted early action and almost cried when I got my acceptance letter. I spent an amazing year learning to rethink how I saw the world, to be “ruthless”, as my drawing professor, Harold Reddicliffe told us to be. I loved every minute of it, but I felt a strange nagging that I hadn’t entirely noticed before, and that was for a sense of adventure. I had lived in Massachusetts my entire life, in an incredibly homogenous and safe environment, and I wanted so badly to experience things from a new point of view. So I packed up my belongings and withdrew from BU to move to Southern California.

I picked SoCal because I honestly hate the winter, and it seemed as opposite as I could go while staying in the continental US, and because I had met so many people at BU who sung the endless praises of California and the arts. I moved first to Costa Mesa, and then to Long Beach. I traveled, endlessly up and down the coast between San Diego and Oregon, making friends who taught me how to forage for mushrooms and herbs and vegetables, slaughter cows and chickens and turkeys for food, and make wine and beer. I had no desire to become homesteaders like them, but their worldview helped drastically reshape my own. To this day, I am happiest out in the woods, just like I was as a child.

I enrolled in a community college program at Orange Coast College, because you cannot enter straight into a state school in California if you’ve already begun another program, so for 6 years, I worked through pre-requisites before transferring to California State University Long Beach. Metalsmithing was my immediate love, I loved the practicality of it, perhaps not in practice but in product. Metalcrafts, be them blacksmithing or silver or goldwork, are highly functional. Unlike other fields, you can choose to talk about them all you want, how to colors represent this that or the other, but at the end of the day, if you can’t make a rivet and your solder seams suck, there’s no amount of flowery language to talk that away. You can’t hide behind it. Sure, I respect and enjoy all forms of art, and I’ll talk your ear off about color theory and symbolism and psychology of our artistic choices till the cows come home, but I will always value craft and skill. Interestingly, that is something I have come to enjoy about Graphic Design as well.

Stone setting was an early favorite of mine. I love semiprecious stones, every color, inclusion, crack, those are things that the planet made through eons, with heat and pressure and random geological activity. I love to work with stones that have very specific, inclusions in them, around which I can inform the design. Despite the pieces on the left and right, the center piece is what I would consider my calling card. I have never been much a fan of symmetry, like other things I respect and appreciate it, and recognize its application at times, but asymmetry is where I find myself more excited.

Along with stone setting, enamel work was my other constant. Enamel is the fusion of glass powder to a metal surface, usually steel, copper, silver or gold, through the application of incredibly high heat. Through practice and trial and error, you learn the chemistry and chemical workings of how the glass and metal behave with each other: the way you build up layers of glass, how you clean or choose not to clean the metal, the way you apply the heat all lead to different effects and it is only through patience and hard work that you learn these principals. From here I moved on to cloisonne.

Cloisonne is a much more exacting and unforgiving art. The application of glass powder when wet to individual cells created painstakingly with fine silver wire over many layers is a fickle mistress. If overheated, the above reaction happens, where the silver floods and compacts the glass into a pool. This is called a eutectic reaction, and there are many artists who have spent years learning the chemistry behind this reaction in order create it purposefully. Anything made with glass, when done incorrectly, will eventually crack, break and explode over time, if not immediately. It is through this practice that I learned about impermanence, and the importance of not being too attached to our work. We create, melt down, create again, it breaks, you take notes and adapt. I love the minutia of this process.

After graduating from CSULB, I spent a year teaching in several capacities, I tried my hand at teaching college metals courses but found it wasn’t for me. I had taught for many years, and still do, for one week every June at the Idyllwild Arts Academy in Idyllwild CA, which continues to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I always knew that I needed to find a way to make this love financially viable, because at the end of the day our bills wont pay themselves, but through the teaching, retail jobs, and endless craft fares and jewelry shows, I could never fully make ends meet. It wasn’t until my final summer in CA, teaching at Idyllwild when my appendix almost ruptured, causing an emergency appendectomy, 3 nights in a hospital and a $45,000 bill (that I had to fight tooth and nail with my shitty insurance company for every dollar they tried not to cover) that I realized I needed to find a way to make my love of art more stable.

Computers were never, never, NEVER my thing. I hated them. Why would I try to learn something that changes every year? How could being cooped up staring at a screen for hours a day possibly make me happy? WTF is the cloud anyway? I left California bound for MA after 7 amazing years feeling unsure. It wasn’t until my sister followed these same thoughts through a masters program in graphic design herself, after being faced with the same fears of financial insecurity, that I began to consider it an option. I tried a few online courses, and eventually enrolled in pre-requisite classes at Suffolk University, which almost made me rock firm on my previous hatred of computers. I dropped out, and spent three years working retail at Patagonia (a company I still LOVE to this day, ask me about why its so expensive! I love that question…) During this time i tried to teach myself more about the software, about graphic design principals and practices and eventually it brought me right back to BU.

I cannot say enough about my joy in returning to Boston University. I feel an incredible sense of family and nurturing from my peers and professors, and I feel encouraged to dig deeper and deeper. I found that the same things I love about metalsmithing apply tenfold to graphic design. There is always a place for abstract, for play, for fun, but it is also about communication, and functionality, and there is beauty when there ideologies combine. I feel so much purpose in each project, driving me towards new learning and understanding, whether its in linear columns or directional pamphlets, or abstracted glyphs, I feel immense joy.

Many different artists, makers and creators have influenced me over the years. Kelli Anderson’s explorative illustrated Risographs bring acid tinged color schemes with a vintage feel. Kat Cole is an artist who I have had the pleasure of hearing speak and watching demo many times in Yuma Arizona, she find incredible applications for the forms she constructs to fit the body in imaginative ways that enhance her materials, and she finds incredible balance without overpowering. Aurelie Guillaume is an INCREDIBLE cloisonne artist who crafts imaginative, playful and dreamy figures with immaculate precision. I find myself drawn to artists who tend towards explosive color usage, balanced through design.

As I begin to consider my own future, many things come to mind. Very recently I became aware of Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Design via the documentary The Social Dilemma. Ethics in day to day life have always been incredibly important to me, and the consequences that our actions have upon the planet. I want to dig deeper into the realm of ethical design, and would love to work for a company that feels similarly. Beyond design, I hope to one day say that I have visited every National Park in the US, and to find a way back into metalsmithing, as a hobby. It was my first love, but I see graphic design as a new stepping stone forwards.