Bricolage: 1. a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things. 3. (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork. taken from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bricolage
Bricolage Studios is all about the creation of useful and wearable artful items from materials that are readily available. Everything that I make is hand fabricated from my own design with a strong emphasis on detail. I feel that it is important to concentrate on the little things. Every blow of my hammer on a piece of my jewelry and revolution of my spinning wheel serves an important, albeit small, purpose in each finished work.
I work primarily in two media, metal and fiber, which I am equally passionate about. This passion often leads to the two media intermingling to create fresh, playful jewelry pieces that can be worn with anything from casual attire to evening wear. I mostly work in copper because of its warm tones and ability to take on beautiful patinas. These characteristics combined with the vibrant colors of hand felted wool make an ideal pair in my jewelry pieces.
My fiber passion ranges from the small scale felting that goes into my jewelry pieces to blending fiber, and spinning my own unique art yarns. Learning how to spin and being gifted my very own wheel has really been my creative saving grace. After graduating with my BFA from Adrian College I was stuck. I had no studio and no facility to work in until I bought my house. While I loved my new home very much, it was a lot of work to fix it up and even more work, for me to get my studio set up the way that I wanted it to be (in fact, I'm still be working on it,) so I decided I needed to take a class to get my creative side going again. After attending a fiber show to pick up some much needed wool for felting, I kept thinking about all those ladies spinning away without a care in the world. When I then discovered Lexi Boeger's book Intertwined, exposing me to the world of art yarn, I knew that I needed to learn how to spin.
Then something magical happened. I received the new course catalog for the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and would you believe that they had a beginning spinning class that let you borrow a wheel for the full course! I immediately called only to be crushed when I found out that the class was full. Well, as fate would have it, someone got a bad case of the crud and had to cancel the day of so the first person on the waiting list (me) was called. Needless to say, I made the split second decision to take the 45 minute drive that night and I haven't looked back.
Creating constantly fuels me, fills me up, and really just makes me warm and fuzzy inside. :D Sharing my work brings me joy and that is what Bricolage Studios is all about.
