A memento from family dishes

Today I am working on a commission using broken dishes. The client wanted me to create a small memento using a family member's china...a material that I don't usually work with.

My creative process usually starts with a material that I fall in love with. Sparkling mirror, a beautiful deep purple stained glass or iridescent beads. It's often a particular feature of the material that sets my creative juices into overdrive.

I've been working with stained glass for several years now, so it's the material that I usually use for my work. I find that I use china and broken crockery very little, simply because of how uneven the pieces are and because the patterns seem to be too folk artsy for my aesthetic.

This project has been challenging. I started several times and have scrapped all of the works in progress so far. The dishes don't appeal to me personally and I've been having a hard time deciding how to work them into something that the client will love.

After reworking a design a few times, I scrapped everything and went back to what I know...jewelry. I wasn't sure at first but after getting the majority of the pendant completed I realized that I would probably want to have a small memento that I could keep close to my heart to remember my relative.

A pendant is just the thing! Photos coming soon.

Artistic direction

Artistic direction. A mildly aggravating term for an artist when you are knee deep in uncertainty about where you are heading artistically.

While I have no shortage of wild ideas that need to be brought to fruition, it seems that I am questioning whether or not any of these works should take shape. I am internally editing my thought processes to death.


The creative recesses of my mind are calling out for me to create something more thought provoking - something darker, harder to translate - something unsettling. I'm not talking about zombies or bloody corpses, just works of art that speak another language.