Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to make things. And my focus is diverse, taking me in some interesting directions.
I started creating jewelry in high school, mostly by the lost-wax process. In college, I was making a living selling my jewelry and was the teacher's assistant in the Jewelry/Sculpture Department. I've begun serious jewelry-making again in the past five years, experimenting with other metal-working methods. I continued with metal after college but focused on sand-casting, producing candleholders, various odd objects, and small sculpture. I made custom bronze plaques for buildings and also designed and manufactured belt buckles emblazoned with logos for clubs and organizations, including the Nature Company, the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and air and space museums around the country. My father, brother, and I designed and produced “paper” furniture in the seventies. We created a wide variety of pieces for home and office as well as for displays in major department stores, including Macy’s and Neiman Marcus. Zwirl ball swooshed into my head as a concept sometime around 1985. I had no idea how complicated foam-molding a 3-D product and then mass-marketing it could be. But I’m proud of Zwirl ball’s international success and its inclusion in MoMA’s Design Study Collection. Moving toward a kind of Bauhaus aesthetic, I designed a car air filter lamp, selling more than 100 since 1990. Continuing with my love of fashioning found objects into other unfounded things, my Tupperware lamps took off in the mid-nineties. Each of these cups, bowls, pitchers, and saucers is unremarkable in itself, but put them together with other similar objects, right-side up or upside down, and you get a wonderful collaboration of bright colors and wild shapes. After recently coming across several boxes of stuffed animals at a garage sale, I configured what I call “plush bundles.” The term “bundling,” or “bed courting,” harkens back to the American colonies. If a couple was dating in earnest, to ensure compatibility, they spent the night together in the girl’s bed, retaining their undergarments, with a board running the length of the mattress positioned between them. I get a kick out of the combination of colors and textures in these soft sculptures. And I prefer that the faces don’t show. It's like painting with fur in 3-D. If that makes sense. |