Making Jewelry
Choices, environment, values
I work with metal.
And of course, with professional jeweller's wax, precious and semi-precious stones, pearls, wood, and various and diverse chemicals (ouf!)
This is a small ceramic crucible which I use to smelt silver ingots and fantasy shaped droplets in my workshop. I bought it for myself while still at school, where our crucibles were huge, heavy and stable. Many like it that way, but not me :)
The red color comes from vitrified borax powder that we add to get best results while smelting metal.
I work by hand.
This is among my core values in making art and especially jewelry. I see pieces of art jewelry as objects of unique, amulet-like importance. They let us affirm our physical presence in the world as human beings with unique personalities and dreams. They let us feel ourselves as part of a long long chain of our real, living and breathing predecessors and followers - not just avatars and digital symbols on a screen.
And yes, by value-driven consequence, I don't use 3D in my jewelry (although it might be great for somebody else's concepts!).
Workshop
Students of the Montreal Jewelry School used to have amazing long-hours access to free workshops, but ... enter coronavirus. By the end of my 1st school year I had to find a shared workshop to make practice and creation physically possible.
This is how I found Arterria, a famous Montreal studio on the border between Mile-End and Rosemont. For two years I rented a bench part-time, until finally moving in a full-time access shared studio in Grover building in Ville-Marie. This is where I spend most of my evenings after working full-time for a jewelry supplies business at 620 Cathcart.