 Hello and welcome back to the final session of the Jewelry of Ideas Symposium and in this session we're going to hear from Jamie Bennett, jeweler, enamelist and educator, Doug Bucci, jewelry designer and educator who will discuss materials and methods new and old and this will be moderated by art and design journalist and jewelry collector Lindsey Pollock. Lindsey? Thanks very much. I'm going to go the other way. I'm so thrilled to be here. I'm very honored to be included. There's so many important people here today and it's such an important occasion for the field. I always feel like an interloper into these contemporary jewelry events because I feel as if I'm kind of an amateur enthusiast in many ways. But I'm so I'm I'm Susan, thank you for the occasion and for having me here and Ursula and the Cooper Hewitt and all of you who are going to indulge me for just a couple minutes why I frame up what will be I think a really interesting conversation. So I will be moderating and the format will be essentially I've asked Jamie and Doug to present five slides apiece to share with you some of their work so you can if you're not familiar become familiar if you are familiar you can enjoy seeing some wonderful work and hearing them discuss it and then we will dive into a conversation. But before I kind of address a few of the topics I just wanted to say that I'm just going to read a little list I jotted down for Farago, Daphne Farago, Boston, Drut, MFA Houston, Schneier, the Met, Boardman, you know, LACMA, Lewin, Cooper Hewitt and this is a list of the foundational incredibly important gifts to very important U.S. both encyclopedic all manner of museums since I've been on the jewelry scene and I think what's significant to me personally particularly someone who finds herself in the contemporary art universe is these are all women who have made these gifts these these collections are named for them it's very significant if you go into most other fields even if it's a couple who's collecting it will some reason you know if you read the New York Times auction coverage this week there's five male dealers and six male collectors who were in the room and no women out of the 2,000 people who attended you know that Leonardo auction apparently were female according to the New York Times I'm being facetious but this is a field and Myra got me a little worked up when she was talking about agency of the jewelry field where women are very powerful and very impactful and so you're an incredible dynasty this first wave I think of this these collections as the first wave in a really exciting future for the field so I feel very celebratory today and I'm so excited that I get to continue to visit your collection until May and then on to the future Susan so hooray okay and I will also just say that I felt in this room today a lot of emotion and there's a lot at stake in this field and that also is very special the only things that seem to be at stake in other fields is people bemoaning the commercialization of a market things like this I think people are really passionate people work so hard there's such invention on the part of the makers the institutions the collectors and you know I feel very welcomed and I think of this my engagement as an opportunity to be educated and then I get to also wear some of the objects which is such a pleasure so although I've never missed a train Helen usually somebody says to me you have a something stuck on your shirt lady but anyway that's New York okay so so back to Doug and back to Jamie the real reason that we're here for the moment before I invite them to come up and speak I just wanted to point out they're both ground-breaking artists both are included obviously in the spectacular Lewin collection so you may have already seen their work both of them you know our topic today is materials and methods you know you could talk about a lot of artists through that prism but both of these artists in particular have very specialized one curator said to me monomaniacal devotion to their techniques and so we're gonna hear a lot about that they also though have a really interesting approach to their content and the research that goes into the content and where it comes from I think is very interesting the materials are you know used in very unconventional ways both artists also have done something that I consider to be very generous which is they are have spent a lot of time in the academic space which is I know a very difficult way to you know divide once time but it's you know very generative to your field obviously so that's amazing anyway to begin let me just say that some of the questions will consider what are the ethical implications of using certain materials what ideas drive the content what drives the method what are the what's the role of the materials what makes your work contemporary what makes it grounded in history what you know and also what's your life like as artists so I think I'll stop and we will I know it's the last session so we're gonna you know try to keep it lively they're gonna each show their slides and we're gonna sit in the chairs we're gonna talk for about 45 minutes we're gonna save time for questions and then you know everybody can go and have a big party so why don't Jamie do you want to come on up and do your thing you forgot one thing Doug and I are both raised in the Philadelphia area in part yeah a trio that's a triangle I want to make the same thanks to everyone this is quite a remarkable gathering and you know these things are always so uplifting I know when I get home it's like I can't wait to get back in the studio because you want to participate and that's a lovely part of this and it also I think the the in this collection in which is not the case in all collections there's a real range of approaches to work which is part of what our discussion is is part of the way people do make decisions about work of the support systems they use and that's materials and methods to deal with ideas and I think that for me it makes me think about the consequence of that I've worked with two materials almost my entire career metal and enamel I've not varied from that not really you know how to do a wedding for someone and you know those kind of things but by and large my discipline has been the investigation of a material that has a long history and a methodology that has a long history I mean basically you're taking glass with enamel you're applying it to metal you're putting it into a system which will heat it and it melts on the surface of the piece and you take it out and you have a longer history than probably any other combination of materials other than stones and metal where I've varied is not so much in materiality is has been in my method which is part of my support system and images I'm going to show are sort of like how I've gone through that this is like leapfrogging over you know a 30-year period but that's what we're doing with five slides which I push I'm going to be I'm going to try every button till one works this one right not that one obviously okay that's counterintuitive did you go that you go I was wasn't listening when you were talking to it okay that's me you know when I was first doing enameling I was was working with fairly traditional processes I was doing cloison a work and as I began to work with even though I was working with that in a rather non-traditional way I mean all cloison a at that point was almost all transparent enamel was about the depth of the surface and I began to work with just opaque's and rather muted opaque's at that and I still wasn't satisfied the line was a you know a linear line that had only one weight that was the cloison and the process seemed to trump my ideas you know it I the when I think when people and when I looked at cloison a of that time and particularly my own work the first thing I saw was its cloison anus rather than what I was trying to do with the enamel as a material so I sort of abandoned it I actually just did nothing but drawing and painting for about a year a year and a half I didn't do any jewelry and then began to realize in the drawing and painting there was sort of this idea of the gesture and other things began to occur at the same time I had just started a position at New Pals tucked away in a deep closet from a Stanley Lexham workshop there was electroforming equipment so we dragged it out and I thought you know I don't like the support systems of the cloison and the idea of having to work with enamel in a particular process that in my mind was sort of overcooked and the electroforming you know I was familiar with June Schwarz's work which is electroplating but it's not unlike what I was doing or was interested in doing was working with enamel in the round which was not encumbered by frames or sort of this cloistering of it as a jewel I really wanted to get away from that I was trying to also figure out essentially what in the world is jewelry right what is it good for and I love the idea that there was this instinct as I was doing research about of its longer history particularly in non-western cultures of just instinctively picking up something and applying it to the body and that quality was sort of essential to me in my thinking about what I wanted my work to do so I began working with electroforming and I had like a year year and a half not more of sort of failures because there was no no one really working with the enamel jewelry pieces were collapsing I didn't have the right form but I knew just instinctively that this could and would work so these pieces this piece was a second or third series that I worked on called recall and once I abandoned the idea of the jewel or the frame or the bezel you know then again you're asking yourself well what is a piece of jewelry and and what is its history and what are the associations with it and ornamentation was certainly one of them and I began to look at different systems and traditions of ornamentation and one that comes from the Italian Baroque is this era era called the recall and recall was when ornamentation was form the form was not decorated with ornamentation but the structure itself was an ornament and I love that idea in terms of it being a piece of jewelry it appealed to me primarily because I was trying to seek out why I was doing jewelry I had another career with two galleries I was doing nothing but painting and I was trying to make some decisions about what I was going to stick with and you know the jewelry sort of won eventually because it had more opportunities of it just simply had more opportunities in my mind it wasn't such a closed cloistered sort of idea and not as political at that time so this is one of the early recall pieces which is from the Helen Drutt collection so you go along and you're working in a particular style or way of working and you know I sort of felt after about two or three years of working that way I was sort of copying my last piece and I felt I had sort of made my point about what I wanted to do with that sort of idea of an instinctive piece of jewelry but I kept on going through my head what are some of the opportunities in terms of coming and drawing from the culture of jewelry like going back to essentially what are its origins in Western culture I'm from a Western culture and sort of like responding to that but doing it in a less formal way and I also at this time had had by that time going to my second trip to Istanbul and did a residency at it to you there and I was really looking at you know how various cultures recorded and and used ornamentation as sort of a system of working so I was looking at how alphabets were arranged how labyrinths were drawn how markings on stones moved from simply being a calendric marking to becoming a decorative calendric marking to simply becoming decoration once the calendar wasn't recorded that way anymore so all these different sources were instigations of imagery on these pieces and I thought you know I really was going to reinvest in this idea of the jewel and the history of the jewel in this in this case it was pieces from Byzantium that sort of were influencing the form so I sort of stuck with the general idea I moved away from systems of borrowing from pieces that were based on stone and pure sort of preciousness and went back to a more pictorial image these pieces are you know I think very obviously influenced from different systems of ornamentation I'm not interested in making ornaments but I am interested in how we have turned nature into how we naturalize nature how we have drawn from nature and I'm actually more interested in that than walking in a forest I'd rather look through a book on the history whether it's floral legumes or other records of nature and how we as different cultures have recorded it documented it corrupted it so these pieces are sort of response to that and that's still sort of part of my current agenda this is back to electroforming again and not fabricated these pieces are in fairly low relief I wanted to create these sort of grids of images that come from one's imagination also distorting books that I was looking through that were botanical illustrations I have there's no honesty to them I'm not looking at them directly I mean I'm sort of looking at them obliquely and at the same time I wanted these things to be painterly I wanted the gesture to be applied to these in that I have a great respect for that sort of quality and it's not something that's inherent to using enamel I mean imagine trying to work pushing little things of glass around on the surface of a piece of metal and you're trying to make it look like a gesture when in fact I could take hours to do so it's not some of the things that I'm doing now are actually done gesturally but at this point those marks that you're seeing are not quick they're not like going like that as you would with a pencil they're very carefully drawn out and this is a piece from about a month ago a necklace it's individual tiles and at this point I think about these as sort of being not so much like a dictionary of botanical images more like a randomly sifting through an encyclopedia of images and making decisions about juxtapositions that I'm interested in and how that is how I actually get and gather information I'm the kind of person who goes through a crowd and I hear little conversations here and there and I sort of piece them together they're nonsensical and I actually like that quality I actually think about that as a way that we come to understand many many many things is things don't come in a linear way things come to us in fragments so that condition is something that I've worked with for some time but I'm much more concentrated on that now and that's my fifth slide Doug thank you Jamie thank you Lindsay thank you very much I'd like to special thanks to Susan for bringing us all here for this event and also for the exhibition it's wonderful to look through a room and see a group of makers a group of enthusiasts that have come together for a general purpose as an artist my work is the confluence of art design and science I've earned my BFA in crafts and traditional metals and handmade processes the this began really my search in my expedition into my master's studies in 1994 I attended a lecture hosted by Helen Drutt at the Philadelphia Art Alliance where Stanley Lexen presented the case for the elimination of handwork and craft this lecture to me really signified the beginning of my disbelief and suspending that disbelief for a period of time as I begin investigating the digital but I can't say that's the only place where I exist so I replaced atoms for bits or so I thought at the time and it really became a stretch of my imagination and what I ultimately no one I was comfort with I was working out of my comfort zone so for the past two decades I have actively been engaged in the applied practice of the digital medium and let me go in through some slides here Jamie in the applied practice of the digital medium both in jewelry and functional objects I've acted as an artist a designer and an educator at the Tyler School of Art I search for a truth try to find the me a mode of working that not possible by any other means and not possible by the hand early forms generated in the software emulated something more like a product design or something that came out of a traditional machine shop something that was indicative of the build of aluminum was machined out the wire it was constructed from these these approaches needed to be pushed so these were limitations and the limitations to me were a challenge but I also ultimately asked were the limitations me were the limitation software or the limitations were they a combination of each but I really believe it was mostly me right I like to take the blame for it so as I began to move forward I began looking at things that were said to me and little nods to what I was going to become as a maker and a person that was going to really express myself in the medium of jewelry early on a faculty member Sharon Church at the University Arts dropped a little idea in my head and she said work on what's closest to you and at that time when it was said it didn't mean all that much to me it was really just a statement to a student who she was trying to push and trying to help guide and find something that was about them that wasn't just a regurgitation of what they saw or what they were looking at in history books so with all of these ideas I began pushing on so let me go back to the to the beginning in the affirmation I said I'm a designer I'm an artist and I'm an educator but most and foremost I'm a diabetic I grew up and at age six I was diagnosed with an insulinoma a tumor of the pancreas where to the horror of my parents I spent a year in Children's Hospital in Philadelphia where I was operated on and as a result of my surgery I became a diabetic so understanding this at the beginning this began a journey a journey of an idea that started long ago far before I ever knew that I was going to be a jeweler with with that idea and taking the words of Sharon and pulling them into the present day I was a graduate student struggling for my identity I was looking for a way to express myself and talk about who I was and using those words of what is closest to you I began looking at my own physical state and as a diabetic I wear an insulin pump to administer my medication throughout the day and along with an insulin pump comes all this these wonderful apparatus right you get the stick your finger with a glucose machine you get radio transmitters that now transmit your blood glucose to your insulin pump you print that information out you take it to a doctor's office you use that information to help adjust your insulin levels and also you use that for the betterment of the individual so you can make choices so much like working in the studio it's always been an experiment put a little in take a little away push a little bit further see how far you can take a material the flesh the body and push on so with this in 1999 I began wearing the insulin pump and in that I began to figure out the way I can intervene in that process so as a curious individual and a curious designer I began to look at what this thing was doing I was able to transmit out information into a spreadsheet these infographics that just stayed there that were permanently adhered to this paper bring them into a doctor's office show them that information nod their heads say okay you're gonna live kid right and you walk out and you go through another three month cycle until you end up at the doctor's office again so here I was with all this information this information was somewhat biographical so it was about me he was numbers it was recordings of my blood glucose and facts about me in five-minute intervals throughout my daily existence so what were I what was I going to do with this so with this idea of how do I begin to materialize this right I'm teaching in an industrial design program at the time at the University of the Arts I'm teaching in the jewelry metals program at the Tyler School of Art and I'm looking at what things are going on around me I'm I'm feeling the energy in the room and I'm understanding what's being said and how people are beginning to materialize an idea so I needed to intervene in this practice so with the help of others people have far better knowledge bases in medicine my wife and another gentleman from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital I began to figure out how I can take the radio signal being transmitted from my transmitter and begin to intercept that at my computer so that it would begin to affect the objects that were on the screen so I'm showing I'm kind of jumping forward in the little these but so what I began to figure out that I can take an algorithm I could begin taking my blood glucose data I could create an object in the 3d modeling software and I could allow that information to almost live affect the objects so at this point I'm acting much like a photographer with a contact sheet looking through hundreds of images hundreds of frames and deciding which frame tells the story so these biographical and to become auto really autobiographical but had become biographical studies began to be printed in three-dimensional materials the beauty of this and for me for the last few years is that I could create a form or find another system outside my own dexterity to create a form and begin to materialize it in any material that I desire or any material that was ultimately appropriate to the idea thank you very much all right great so we got we got a great overview now we're gonna dive in and really drill down on some of these these issues that were raised the obvious first question for Jamie in NAML describe how you came to you know you how you came to explore this material and you mentioned some of the people who influenced you in the beginning but what have you found to be so compelling about it and endlessly fascinating and I'm suing your needs I you know whether it's instinctively or just simply from the things that I was exposed to growing up I mean I was always much more interested in color and metal comes in three colors metal comes in like three colors you know and it just was very limiting to me and I had an opportunity to begin working with the NAML when I was in graduate school but the person I was staying with is enthusiastic as he what he knew nothing about it and I had nothing but failures and but I had already signed up for a workshop with a man named Bill Harper in Penland and he sort of solved my technical problems how so well you know you put something in the kiln Thomas was there at the same time yeah as was Mia Metsucado is an amazing as a kid I was surrounded by amazing people who were all interested in ways of working with color with the NAML but at any rate you know things just fail you go in the kiln you over fire wire breaks off just purely things that you are doing because you don't have the control or the knowledge of how to make it work you know in animals very procedural you do things particularly cloison that's part of what appealed to me at the time but it's also what eventually made me make a decision that I didn't want to use a material was that processed so that the end result was already determined what it was supposed to look like as someone who made us kind of a switch I guess then from painting to working with jewelry objects and particularly enamel I mean how did that sensibility or was there some kind of a switch in your practice or your thinking or your no because I think I was doing as I began to really it wasn't actually I was doing enamel well before I was becoming more serious about painting I started really getting involved with it when I was teaching at Boston University and a person who had a gallery in Boston named Clark gallery woman a Meredith Moses came to my studio and was just looking at work and she said you should be doing more of this drawing and painting you know this is really pretty interesting so I just sort of followed that lead and began to split my time between the two and in those days your teaching load was pretty light I thought two days a week I didn't have any committee work those things have changed the people who teach now know that's not the case so you know I was able to work in like basically three careers and when she closed I moved to New Paul's I think I just made a decision that in a long-term commitment I couldn't do both at the same amount I still do a ton of drawing but I don't do any painting anymore in terms of you know enameling obviously I went on to the Cooper Hewitt website I typed in enamel into the collections you get like 11,000 objects and you can spanning history and types and I mean it's such a malleable interesting material but you mentioned in particular that you were inspired by some of these medieval objects like the cloisters and so forth you know how do you feel like that somewhere being implanted in your head but you know you are firmly of an artist of now and contemporary I respect it I don't think it has the effect that it did when I was younger I think you have to understand that enamel historically has been determined by very specific procedures it's cloison a Champleve and a bunch of other French name techniques and we all know La League right yeah including some of the people that used it and I think as I began to work and use the material one as I said I felt sort of trapped in the sort of predictability of what outcome was going to be and I just simply became much more interested in the raw material for a number of reasons one I was trying to avoid the sort of institution of what enamel look like the material its surface and its you know underlining structure interested me more than the processes that were becoming sort of a dictate about outcome but I did want to give up the material because I think enamel I was sort of playing with under fire in a lot of different ways of using it that I was sort of emphasizing the materiality rather than the image and that's how those first pieces began where they're clearly about the material enamel you couldn't distinguish a particular process the bezel free pieces yeah and just for a moment because Bill Harper who I don't think seen the Lewin collection upstairs however a very seminal figure and and what what was it about him and this was a penland I believe right where you encountered him that was inspiring well it was actually was as a result of like Ebbendorf Bob and if I was studying with in Kurt Mastroff had great respect for Bill and he was teaching there there wasn't an enamel in class every session and he was someone that had you know very highly regarded I had just seen an exhibition he was in in New York at the Fair Tree Gallery and his work was very radical at the time you know it's interesting Bruce and I have had a discussion about this in terms of in my mind and I don't mean this in any disparaging way Bill was the last of the traditional enamelist was really the last person in terms of using traditional techniques that was really inventing as opposed to someone who is breaking new ground I think he was the person who really created sort of a culmination of cloison a of a traditional technique a transitional figure yeah thank you all right well let's I'm just gonna kind of back and forth a little bit just so we can mix it up Doug thanks for sharing some of those images let's talk a little bit further because for people who may not be familiar it is a little complicated there's a computer involved so and I know most people are familiar but I mean the ubiquity of 3d printing at this point which it's actually called rapid prototyping right and so our story lithography that story lithography the start and the the loving name of 3d printing has been used and abused quite often and it's it's the way that we come to know it but I but I think what's really interesting at this point by saying that they the use of 3d printing has become has a large audience you can go to a cocktail party at this point and you know it pops up in conversation and you know catches your ear as you're walking through and as you were saying before you thread these things together and you walk up and you act interested and they look at you like oh no we just you know it's just this banal thing to them right and well you what you wanted many interesting things you said that I jotted down was you what you really wanted to make forms that were not possible to make by hand so if you could describe just briefly again because now you know the technical not you know the software right but you know so you when you take your data from your your output of your machine and then you end up putting it into this this 3d 3d modeling modeling software and then it ends up here I mean so what what so what it what it was I worked with a engineer who is doing a bit of biomedical research at Thomas Jefferson University and what we figured out is how to take a receiver that's plugged into the computer that as these numbers are coming through so an average blood glucose of a diabetic might be between 80 to 120 and that's the target but you know they go all over the place so these numbers can be from 50 to 400 depending on what you ate or depending on what you ate so what I said what what began to happen was this information was picked up it was transmitted out from your body in real time so it's a platinum probe with an enzyme that as it dissolves it creates energy and that reads as a numerical number so so that's that's being trans so that information being transmitted out from a sensor I could at some point I'll show it to you in the course of this discussion but it's a wonderful beautiful piece of jewelry that I wear 24 hours a day I sleep with I shower I do you know I could write a computer so but in terms of the form of the objects that you're making so the form of the objects if you think about it this way if I put something as simple as a sphere on the screen and the spheres in the geometry is controlled by if we go to the back to the basic principles of design we have point we have line curve surface volume so it's the CAD software is acting much in that way so what I'm able to do is I'm able to take that blood glucose data and it controls the number of points in an object so if the object that I created had a hundred points in it to be a mean or be the average I could come in with any number and it begins to change or morph the objects itself so that's why we see different amounts of stretch or loose yeah different densities and different stretch and and that's what's going off and in some of the the kind of the sine curviness of this goes back and it's it's a nod to the graphs in the the charts that you have the sine curve that flows and everything moves a long time in this path visually that goes up and down and and it's supposed to look cellular at the end of the day so so the cellular makeup of this is a a bit of a my interpretation this the cellular has become ubiquitous you know there's a New York Times cartoon is a trend it's a it's a trend that I think I think a lot of it now that we see is trend but going back 15 years ago this was something that you were programming this is something that you were wrapping your head around and trying to figure out the nuance of how something so simple could be so complex it's like the complexity of this was was rather unique but you know I began to look at the honeycomb so if you take the translation of diabetic diabetes mellitus which is the proper name for type 1 diabetes it means honey siphon so the honeycombs and these kind of siphon sponge forms became a part of the visual line do you use only your own data or do you I I've done I've done other people now I've done you know I've done portraiture of other people but it's mainly been an investigation with myself I think a lot of it is HIPAA laws I it's kind of a hard thing to get a secrecy the secrecy it's hard you know I can't really you know unless they were willing to give up the information and so I have you know friends glucose meters and friends apparatus sitting at the house ready to be made into things so okay so we just went into like a deep technical conversations now I don't know that's good because that we need to know now we're gonna go to the other direction real very quickly Jamie can you list you know three artists who's work influences you there's a lot I mean I historically I mean I think one person I keep coming back to I met him in the early 80s is Herman younger I went to Germany for an exhibition and we went to visit him in his house and I really didn't know his work but he's someone who was working into a certain degree with enamel he was using a lot of different materials in yellow old historical materials and there was like this sort of gesture to jewelry that I was totally unexpected I just wasn't expecting it because of the German and other European work that I was aware of at the time was very tight very cool very modern and while his was modernist there was a abstract sort of expressionist gesture to the work and it was something I had a sort of a an interest in and a curiosity about and an affinity to so certainly Herman would be someone I would say as a mentor because I went back to see him many times after that are any painters you know I'm a big fan of Johns and Paul Clay and other people that have used line and color as both symbolically and as a marking on surface John's I'm not it's interesting I'm not as interested in John's is imagery but I am very interested in how he comes make and makes decisions about composition where he draws from both historically art historically culturally historically that interests me a great deal thank you Doug do you have anyone you want to name well I'm looking at recently I've been very taken by in some similar vein is Jeffrey man who's doing digital work and what he's doing he's using he's using algorithms to affect objects and to change objects so it might be a conversation over a table of traditional tableware and the dialogue going across the table will begin to morph and change those objects that are in interference of the two individuals having that having that dialogue is a video or it's a video so he's doing a lot of it so it's combining animation and it's combining also 3d modeling animation and everything else you know 3d output as well okay thank you I guess this is a question someone suggested to me that I ask you both over the lunch table so that was nice so what issues are you grappling with Jamie you've said you had in your many years of teaching suggested that your students keep in New York Times by the jeweler's bench so I'm just curious what issues you're grappling with and how that might or might not show up in your work yeah it actually I think social issues are something that I separate from what I do in my work I mean in terms of a overt representation I just have never felt sort of an adequacy to do that and so I came to a realization that's not something in an area that I'm going to go that's not to say that I'm not interested in how what we see visually in jewelry has an impact on our social or cultural circumstances right I think as I'm when I'm working and making decisions about where I'm going to go the things that I probably have that the largest struggle with is coming to some conclusion about what is jewelry good for and making some decisions about what in the world and why do we need it I really have I'd like to think of myself as a student of the history of jewelry I've done a lot research on various culture cultures and how they have drawn jewelry into their day-to-day life and why it has made shifts I mean it fascinates me that you know the image images that come from nature for instance exist in virtually every culture that makes jewelry every every culture that has made jewelry has drawn images from nature which is it makes sense it's innate it's an innate material right and every one of them virtually has interpreted differently they have abstracted it in some cultures they have naturalized it in others but I think the very fact that one could look at a particular leaf or a particular flower whatever it ends up being a branch and in one culture it's rendered in a totally different way than another so I'm I'm really taken by the fact that as this goes on how does this happen I do it very intuitively when I make these abstractions you add the design very right I don't have a flower in front of me if I'm drawing any image that comes from nature whatever it's a being yeah I mean I like the idea that I allow myself that chance to invent and abstract from it and the very fact that I'm trying to figure out why and how that phenomena that condition the psychological condition of that has exist in so many cultures because there are certainly the ability to render it perfectly any number of cultures and artists could have done that but they choose and have chosen not to historically not I'm not talking about just in a modernist sense you know so I really struggle with why that occur not struggle is not the right word because I don't struggle with it but I do think about it a lot and I do wonder I mean just wonder do you think sitting a why we find that necessity to not just perfectly emulate but to distort to rupture from the reality of any number of images that we work from taking such a philosophical approach really thinking these things through do you think that does manifest itself in its work I mean I in your work I think it does yeah yeah I like to think it does and Doug what about you or do you I think I think ultimately if you're I'm kind of sitting up here as the talking head on digital but I think what's really important to me and what I struggle with now is moving beyond the digital so that in I talk about this humanistic approach bringing it back into you know and that always being the concern we could take this tools and these technologies and all the things that we learn and all this information that we gathered but it's what's good for all of us is ultimately what I'm concerned with and I look at my teaching in the classroom in addition to what I practice in the studio and I have a number of students that walk into this you know this studio where they go well there's a value judgment that almost occurs to them they go is one why one's better than the other this or that do you mean the hand or the digital and I think that that comes from really polarizing positions at some point but what what I think is a strong thing in my practice and also in my teaching practice how I begin to bring those together and the the students are fluid they move from one place to the other without really being all of that concerned with how they're making something I think the end goal is mostly how they accomplish what they're out to do I guess these native digital kids who are right it's always been right it's I'm just curious is that because I think about when I see digital work most of it right is that sort of hyper processed it's hyper processed there's no room for error right or actually digital production right that's the whole intent of it is that the idea of mistake is removed yes and no there there is the the predetermined notion that you can click draw curve and determine what you want but then there's the side of algorithmic responses and you know feeding information and the something that you can get back something that you didn't expect and there's there's accident in in the digital there's accident in the studio by hand you know I think they parallel and the the more that I move forward in this practice I find that I I struggle with how to bring those two together and really find the best way to show that in the work and educate the students so when you do this I'm just curious do you go back after this is done and comes off the machine and mess around to make it in perfect I tickle the hell out of it now and it's it's really and I think I think that's what's coming to it if you could see the color like the piece the piece upstairs and this here's here's some the colors more evident here so if we kind of go this life-to-death progression right we have color we have these blues we have all these things going these are traditional dying processes you know it's an island I bath fabric dye over a cauldron that you're dunking them clean rinsing them you're brushing things off and and really I could I what I love is still that the finishing of this as I always said like when I was at the bench you know the finishing took twice as long most most cases and the printing than the actual making of something and the same thing here it's like I could spend thousands of hours trying to figure something out trying to figure out a riddle or a puzzle and I could then the next day wake up and you know fix the CAD file or you know so you are doing finishing I'm doing taunt and it's really important to me to have my hands on that the materials that are coming out are a lot of times somewhat refined yeah they have some level of finish you could accept that you can send those objects out in the world but I think it comes back to my traditional training you know that and the idea of virtuosity you know you really need to begin to flex your skill and flex your knowledge base so that the pieces get what they deserve you know I early on with the original series of this piece I was able to email that file to Germany for schmuck in 2010 printed dropped off print printed in Germany dropped off right so I like that now these things are different right so these objects what's amazing is objects can be in this case anywhere in the world at any time right like on demand I'm printing but I think what's really important to me is that I like to affect it as much as I like to go back and put a benchmark in silver or gold somewhere in that object so here I can show I think we saw when so it's it's not called computer aided making it's computer aided manufacturing right so so why do you make a decision to do most of these are one offs right one off the limited production anything right so I think they're I'd like being able to see it and honestly I had this I was just saying this a couple days ago is that in some cases I find these pieces to be done at file level at the virtual level and as and the printing is just to begin to complete their journey of their cycle so because you're saying the objects almost besides the point if I'm designing jewelry it either needs to go on an avatar somewhere in an animated environment or it or it needs to go and be printed and placed on someone it's this is much like the object being suspended in a vitrine in the museum right it's out of context so if I don't really can the pieces need to be completed by touching them feeling them affecting them but also by placing them on the body I remember David Solly the painter saying once that he separated making and thinking because mainly he had so many employees he had to separate making and thinking but like do you feel that way you don't like is making you think and you develop an idea or the form because I don't I don't separate I do make a lot of decision-making based on even what Tom was saying I count on an error to respond to and I bury things all the time that are a drawing underneath the analog piece and I work over it to create background I mean there's all sorts of things occur as I'm making right right I I do I think thinking is a private time you know thinking is that going back to the traditional jewelry mode of sitting there at the computer at the bench and thinking through an idea and really pushing and pulling and and finding really the errors and all of I mean that's what there's so much error in this and there's so much of a level of craft that needs to occur so that these objects can be realized or made tangible but I do you know I you know I walk around the neighborhood I sit in the studio alone I pester my dear wife and you know but I think through these things and and I and I think that I need to then push out and the manufacturing is the push out because what I found what's beautiful about the digital process for me is that I could sit there and controls e controls e undo undo undo I didn't want that but at some point I have to make a conscious choice and select something and the minute I send that thing out to be printed it's out the door and I can think about other things and then I could start the whole process over again with something else Doug just also because this is we're speaking about materials and methods I have a fabulous bangle that you made and it is pink and flesh color it's very kind of bodily feeling and I know that that's made out of different material than can you discuss some of the variety of things you so the materials are a variety of different ways we have plastics we you know we have plastics from nylon to acrylic Krillites or Krillix we have metals we even have flesh at this point not that I'm doing flesh but it's a very interesting idea so the the bracelet that you could just be you could just be willy-nilly in the shop there goes a finger print another one right so I think the the bracelet that you have in I look at materials in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish a lot of these things are about the body of the body you know they're all about the body of the body and I think early on I began looking at different materials and it's the discovery is that you send things out you look you get them back and you you examine you go this is beautiful or you know a friend in the audience here like Michael Geich you know it goes oh I'm printing this material at this facility you send the file out he prints the necklace gets it back you know and you begin to examine you begin to see what they do so the bracelet that you have is actually a biocompatible hearing aid material that was printed in Michigan so all these things became these say Caucasian flesh tones that I was printing and you know we can do every flesh tone at this point and but I think what was interesting is that got back this flesh tone began to look at auto finishes you know going back to the traditional painting sanding away painting again sanding oh so that you're kind of this push pool still occurs and it wasn't just having this object you know the beautiful man in the UPS outfit shows up and delivers the box it was you know in you open it it's that the piece hadn't finished its journey hearkens back to the finished fetish artists in California the 60s and John the Kraken that's fantastic I love my bangle I and I smashed it and he fixed it for me I loved it you know you're enjoying your jewelry when you can't fix something okay let me let me let me let me jump away from technology for a minute and we'll go Jamie you mentioned that you make drawings as well and other things and and how does the drawing fit into your practice are they preparatory are they generative no they're it's sort of a back and forth you just hold up so that it's a back and forth resource I mean I I I don't do renderings for pieces but I may work on you know numbers of days just doing nothing but drawing and then sort of disappear from that you're working between because you work in a series method in a series exactly kiff had described heard do you use that in between when you're trying to move exactly yeah and also they don't you know the drawings may follow more often not they do proceed the work yeah I don't look at it as a way of say a singular way of developing ideas I mean I may move to the next room in the library and just go and read or go through some manuscripts that I have and then go back to drawing again we keep the drawings pinned up in a particular array in your studio when you then get back to your bench or no it's interesting I was interested in an exhibition where they had it was up for the New York Foundation for the arts 30th anniversary and they wanted to put some jewelry in it from from people have received grants and I and they had this is Jasper Johns or Ellsworth who Jasper Johns Foundation right no New York no New York Foundation for the arts okay sorry but anyway they had no cases and they had no insurance they had no guard so I'm like I don't think I'm gonna be putting jewelry in this show but I had been collecting these Florentine frames these small Florentine frames so I did 60 drawings in these Florentine frames and sort of a salon style framing and they're still silly in those frames I don't know what I don't keep them around those Florentine frames no little leaf gold leaf frames so that's as far as I've taken in terms of formalizing the use of them but mostly they just sit stacked or in portfolios and and also just in sketchbooks you showed us a very recent piece the last piece that you presented the necklace I'm wondering is this the beginning or the end of a new series the beginning of a new series and what are we where we headed with this you know it's it's the beginning is always iffy this is probably transitional from the last series the Lumen series but Peripheria I've become and I have always been interested as I'm sort of saying in these sort of margins around a general pathway let's say or a prominent or primary element in a situation whether it's an audience or whatever as compared to the things that are at the sort of boundaries or the borders whether it's like you know you got the carpet you got a piece of lint sitting there on the floor you know I I sort of drawn to that condition and I think what I've tried to do is not really document that but emphasize that how does this piece reflect that approach well if you sort of look at it each yeah it's hard to see in this image but you know like it this is gonna sound which one's the middle one the middle one so friends like small things like this it was very funny I was going from where I live to Siena's actually and I was driving through this town called Milan and there was this area that all these trees had fallen as if someone had arranged them in these perfect beautiful geometries and so I stopped and I was taking some pictures and this guy pulled up in a truck he said do you see something I don't see you know I guess so but I you'll see this repeated like throughout a number of pieces certainly in the drawings that I've done this motif this motif because it was just so striking and it was it was in the beginning winter the snow headphones it was all white background behind it and just these bare limbs and it really did look like someone had trimmed everything away from them so it's like it's that just stuck with me as something that was sort of marked like who's gonna pay attention to that but outside the norm of what I would be typically doing as I'm driving down the route and thinking about what am I gonna talk to Sienna about you know and you live upstate is that right are those trees on the one to the left or no the upset the that one yeah those abstract sort of leaf form over a sort of abstracted background right and these pieces are sort of losses there's a crease in each one of them so I wanted them to have this sort of terrain to the surfaces and your work is tends to be double-sided is that right and why do you work on the back I just started to do it and I like the idea that I said this before it sounds like a cliche but the public and the private right it's sort of interest to me and maybe I have a little horror vacuum I couldn't imagine leaving it empty and so how do you know when in this series oh yeah please it's a way for me to test something I'm going to do but it's on the back little make less consequence how do you know when you I mean how many series is have you done and how do you know when the series is coming to a conclusion and you're ready to go on I think I said this earlier I there's probably probably the longest series I've ever done was a series called Priari and there was some 25 26 pieces in it how many series how many independent series is do you think you've done dozens or dozens and how do you know how will you know or do you have a sense that comes over you when you're ready to one I get bored but frankly I'm just bored and I think I've covered what I wanted to cover and that I don't I think there's only been a few times where there's been distinct ruptures between one series and the next like when I decided to stop the electroforming and I went into the more jewel like form that's a really distinct rupture that's you know they're diametrically opposed ideas about what perhaps jewelry could be at least in my mind they were so that was a very conscious decision to move from one to the other more normally I work more evolutionary they one series sort of moves into another gradually and Doug I wanted to ask you a little bit about just as we spoke to Jamie about his drawings you also do installation and there's other sorts of things in your practice it's newer work and you know there's there's a design side of the practice and we're doing consulting you know and it's it comes out of the digital and but it's mainly mainly you know one-of-a-kind commission commission work and working on on new work that really begins to encompass a lot more than just the object that it the freedom of of designing and working digitally is that you can realize the whole space the whole volume and begin moving around it so you can move around an object and flip an object or you can move around a whole interior space of a home so you're becoming more ambitious in your scale becoming more ambitious in the scale and then the output is is changing and and as I become freer of being so burdened by the digital I'm able to go back to you know traditional means of producing things I'm able to go back to things that I that I know from my past in my history and begin pulling them into the present day but there's there's something you know business people call it block chaining it's how you begin to link together different processes for a particular outcome and then that's what I begin to that's what I really think I began to do I began to take all my experiences and link them together into bigger projects and you said now you're freer to add the hand because you've given yourself permission I've given myself license you know and and I think that there there isn't I'm hitting it I'm hitting a roadblock where as you you're going down a road and Jamie talks about the split in continuity of a design I think you know it's kind of these beacons over the years that I I stretch and I find continuity between these beacons or these you know towers of information and I go from one to the other and I link them together and Jamie and I was wanted to ask Jamie this too and I'll kind of ask this and I make a statement is that outside of your technical process is you know the things that link and that provide continuity all the way through and I think I found I really found the body as the continuity and you know I'm working now with cadaver scans and other medical data that then can be used in terms of ornament to read in replacement of ornamentation but it's it's still the same groundwork that's been set it's just looking at different bits of information and different ways of processing it okay great I guess just we could touch for a moment on because Jamie you had particularly mentioned something about you know this kind of ethical implications of using certain materials like maybe gold or you have any thoughts on well I worked you know I I made a decision you know for some time that I work with a traditional material and so I think for me to stop and say okay I'm not gonna work with gold anymore because there is a certain degree of corruption to gold whether it's about its mining or you know from an ethical standpoint or from a consumerism standpoint is associated with you know vanity and all sorts of other problems I still feel and in my mind for the kind of work I do that it's a logical material to use with another traditional material I've not I can't find I haven't found I could switch to silver and downgrade it a little bit but it would just be another vanity to do that in my mind it didn't it doesn't make sense the ground your work also in this history then in some way it probably does you know on the other hand I think when people make a decision to choose other materials I think there's a lot of people just do it we're talking about trends this morning I think there's just a logic to trends you know people don't work from just simply the idea of the object they work primarily from the logic of what is influencing them around them whether it is their teacher or a general zeitgeist of the kind of things are going on right now and I think that is why we see people all of a sudden abandoning I mean there's people they're ethical about it and strategic about it no question I have no doubts about that I don't doubt sincerity but there's a lot of work that is simply just following that logically as a trend because it is part of the culture of that area or of that place or that location I think the same thing occurs with digital work you know if you're studying at at Tyler right now it's logical that you're gonna be working with digital technology exactly it's just the way trends occur is that because there is a phenomena going on that you are embedded in and you're sort of you know told you should be working this way I remember Stanley you know reprimanding Bob Ebbendorf for using natural materials because you just shouldn't do it you know I mean it was a long time ago but it's you know it occurred yeah so there are a lot of good digital work being produced and when we have you upstairs we have Arthur hash but there's not a lot in in this exhibition I really you know I believe there's a ton there's a number of people that are out there for instance you know people that have come out of Tyler Emily Cobb Emily Culver there are there young women that are working that are doing exceptional work keep an eye out for that okay great well it's it's almost time to start our Q&A I think so we have a microphone over here if there are any hands I think I see a hand she comes oh scream that you were early on in this conversation you you mentioned my humanistic approach could you go back to that and explain that to me I think I think what's ultimately I in the back of my mind I have this sense of responsibility of what I'm what I'm creating right and I think that there's a bigger social picture in terms of audience that I want to connect to there's a whole culture of diabetics for instance in the world that I'm in a sense speaking to I'm speaking to in a sense I'm speaking to everyone but I think I target that group of people in the back of my mind because as I move forward with this work I'm not just making another chachki and I'm not just making something that is just going to be another bracelet what I'm doing is I'm trying to create and send the message out there in the world with this with this wearable object that I can take that piece of information and send it out on someone's wrist and they wear it out in the world and it's in maybe in some sense that if the conversation occurs and they've heard me speak or they know more about the the bracelet that they can then begin to articulate what it's doing but in the picture yeah but do you do you need to speak about it or is the bracelet or the necklace doing it I hope the bracelet or the necklace does it right it does it's the communicator out there in the world it's I'm not going along with it to to talk about how wonderful my child is but I think getting back to the humanistic part of it I I'm always concerned and I think as I move forward this is the long big picture of this how can I take what I'm doing in this process and begin to aid or help a group of people you know mainly type 1 diabetics thank you I'd like to direct this to Jamie one of the lead motifs in modernism has been the abandonment of knowledge and technique so you look at a lot of the early modern painters and they were superb draftsmen and yet they gave it up like Picasso or you think of Matisse giving up painting to do the cutouts so the the idea of abandoning competence of what you're good at is very much part of modernism and yet you've stuck with enameling since the beginning since I first met you why haven't you given it up in all these years I yeah you know I think the same question could be asked of someone like Bryce Martin like who started an abstract painter you know and decided to switch from being a purely abstract painter doing color field and copying Stella and other people to moving into dealing with just simply a stick as a means of putting paint on the surface of a canvas he didn't give up paint he just changed his working methodology so he moved away from the brush in my case another he created a new support system by using a stick and paint on the end of a stick to paint a gestural line on a canvas and he still felt no need to move away from oil paint and I think in my mind I still haven't found a reason to move away from it I think there are materials that have limited visual possibilities like you know we that's why we don't see anodizing anymore and we don't see titanium and all these other refractory metals because they all look the same in the end that's my prejudice but I just felt that that they they they went their full run and they had no other possibility there's a few people that have managed to milk something else out of it but it's usually in combination with another material and I just think I haven't found a dead end at this point to how I'm using enamel we have another question right here I don't know yeah hi Doug this is a question for you my name is Aviva and I'm a product designer and teaching as well so my question is to you as someone that use you know the digital world how you are able to transform this idea that at the end of the day you know the digital world it's basically a tool and what is like really the the line between is it really a design that you intend to do or is it like really an accident and then you use it you know what I mean as a design because that's my problem you know what I mean I right it's a horse or a cart type of scenario I think what just like and and I'll kind of go with the idea that I really consider the digital medium that you're presented with us a group of tools that you can then begin to poke and affect that medium with right and that's as we begin to learn that you go through and you sit there looking for some truth or some you know sense of what you want to accomplish that we click and we move and we drag and we're you know we're happy with what we see but what's beautiful is when we begin to discover things that we didn't know right so we go down a road that was a little less traveled and we begin to figure out how we could be in linking things together and that's where the work becomes exciting I think you know I made reference to the the billet of aluminum being machined out right and I think is from a product standpoint or even a traditional machining standpoint we know that we could click in extrude and you know come mill and reduce you know mill out a block of aluminum and anodize it here we go we're trying to thread right and we could anodize this thing and we would you know string it together and have something that was wearable but one when you look at it it begins to look like the machine manufactured object it's very indicative of its process so and I think what becomes exciting and I think as you as a designer is that when the things start to begin to transcend what the actual technology is and I think that's happening more and more in the digital process because the organics are so prevalent and what's being done and I think we have that kind of desire to go back to nature even though that the tools that we're using are not these analog sticks that we use to push any longer they become this this burdening mouse that we end up with like chicken claws in the morning because we have so much carpal tunnel from clicking but I think we we begin to affect that medium for for that organic form again and I think that's where it's going well and I think a lot of people right well I think it's just like music right there's virtuosity that someone can tell you I could tell you I play bass and I play bass rather poorly but I could tell you I play but I don't have a level of virtuosity in that right and I think the same thing goes with any medium or any practice is that we begin to learn we begin to progress but in the end the work that's really becomes important is the work that shows the virtuosity of that particular medium or that particular individual critical conversation around all this is very nascent I would imagine so it's still being filtered out what's gonna become significant in the long term so thanks for your question we have one more time for one more Susanna there's lots of hands so I just wanted I'm trying to be fair here and then I have a quick announcement after your question so before we all depart oh no I just wanted to ask if virtuosity is is the conclusion and is the virtuosity for its own sake is that a guarantee that it's that it's art that it's where's the soul I'm asked for a better wrap-up question and I think where that's where the human experience goes back into that for me that's the soul for me and all the soul for me is the human the human interaction and the human interface and this and I I don't I don't think virtuosity is the end ever I think virtuosity you still pursue that perfection it might be in a different form or a different stylistic matter but that it's always the drive you're never happy you're never satisfied even even as the maestro I would add that you know I don't mean it arrogantly I could pretty much do whatever I want with the animal and it's very unsatisfying when that's what I do right you know I recall when I first started doing and working with painting now which is very different than the enamel you to particularly work with I was really getting off on how good I was at doing these fine lines and you know you could trick yourself and to think what you're doing is important by just getting off on your virtuosity and being satisfied with and clapping your hands for yourself or massaging yourself I just found in the end it was very unsatisfying it was a great deal more than I wanted to accomplish so I agree with you it's not in and of itself of any major consequence for sure that's why it's called virtuosity yeah please join me in thanking these wonderful panelists thank you wants to make an announcement so thank you to our wonderful panel that was a wonderful way to wrap up this afternoon I wanted to thank everybody for coming and making