[playful music]
- I was this recycling evangelist crazy person.
Going back to 1980 when no one ever thought about it.
When I decided to start using recycled materials
to make my work, it was embarrassing.
I'm going to say literally embarrassing
to start using tin cans, trash,
waste from the waste stream of our society.
I want it to be amazing craftsmanship
in the most humble material. [hacksaw cutting]
I can't make any mistakes, or else it's ruined.
In my head, it's ruined.
I love jewelry, first of all.
I'm passionate about jewelry.
But when it came to making jewelry,
I wanted the jewelry to be more than about decoration.
My own work represents bigger ideas.
And jewelry is a lot more than just a decorative object
that people put on.
They create an identity for themselves by what they wear.
These three bracelets talk about the role of jewelry:
prestige, value.
The outside of the bracelet is actually gemstones
and then identity.
It has the UPC code on the inside.
This is gonna be the inside of the wrist hole.
I have to cut a strip.
It looks like a calculation.
How wide does it need to be?
It requires a lot of hand strength.
Very hard to do.
For my undergraduate degree and my master's,
I studied metalsmithing.
When I got out of school,
I worked as a jeweler and then I worked as a silversmith
for a plating company.
I file every single one.
Working with metal requires precision.
The tolerance ends up being like a thousandth of an inch
just by hand.
I do not ever paint the tin cans.
So I have to work in a way that I never mark the surface
in some way that would leave damage.
And I did it.
Very low tech.
Lots of experience. [laughs]
It's not just about using a found object.
Not for me, at least.
It's really about the messages in our society
that are all over the packaging that we use.
And she's perfectly dressed and she has all the high heels
and her ribbon, and she's cleaning the floor.
I've got thousands of tin cans.
They're organized by color and pattern.
That's candy.
But I'll also have candy pattern.
The idea is to remember everything I have in my head.
I have so many dollhouses that I just hang them
from the ceiling and they're all over the place.
Printed steel doll houses
have wonderful domestic images on it.
A tribute to honoring women's roles in society,
which has been my interest for a long time.
In high school, I took shop.
It was unheard of.
At that time,
I wanted to be an architect and the teacher says to me,
"Architecture takes four years of education
"and then a few more years of education
"and then some internship,
"and you'll be wanting to be married and have children
before you're done with your professional skillset."
And it changed me.
Now, that's a betrayal in some way,
but it changed the direction.
And so instead of applying to architecture school,
I went into art school.
Even at graduate school,
I was learning the technical skills
that were generally a sphere of men, right?
Metalsmithing and jewelry was the sphere of men.
I'm getting an education
that's supposed to empower me to be a professional,
yet I still love cooking and cleaning
and making my own clothes.
I'm constantly surfing this conflict
between professional ideas that women can be doing anything
and the joy that I get from domestic responsibilities.
I met my husband Bill in 1976.
He was called Wild Bill at the time.
Our dates usually started at like 10 or 11 o'clock.
We both wanted to do our work first.
I knew I wanted to have children and raise children
to be creative, responsible people
that will contribute to society.
But at the same time, I was petrified.
And it was very difficult, and it is very difficult.
So many of the early pieces
dealt with this conflict of women's roles.
I wanted to address the volume of plastic
in our environment.
I started with a few bracelets.
I was making with a variety of different plastics.
Like I have the orange,
that came from orange juice containers.
The aqua color and the pink and purple came from the salon.
But I realized that the black plastic
is the one plastic that's not recyclable
in most communities.
The optical scanners that sort plastic
in recycling centers can't see the black plastic.
There's lots of things that are packaged in black plastic,
salad bowls, takeout trays.
These are from rotisserie chicken.
The shape of the plastic container can really contribute
to the interest of the jewelry.
It's very important to me
that I cut every single piece by hand.
I want each one to be irregular and different.
Generally, I want it to be as wild and crazy as possible
and threatening.
The shapes look like they're gonna poke you.
I think that it begins to address,
just in the aesthetic of the bracelet,
how dangerous plastic is to our environment.
Suzanne Ramljak, a curator, calls me up to invite me
to an exhibition called Uneasy Beauty
at the Fuller Craft Museum.
And would I make a bracelet?
I said to her, "Can I make something bigger?"
[gentle flute music]
It was a tremendously daunting project
to make something that big.
I had to cut each and every individual piece
and then drill two holes in each piece
and then thread all these pieces.
My original idea of 6 feet grew to 26 feet.
I really thought the model had to be swallowed up
as if she was being consumed by the entirety of the necklace,
because in many ways,
our environment is being consumed
by the impact of plastic.
[gentle flute music]
I have a super-duper serious side,
but I also believe on the positive side,
the optimistic side that we can change the future
by our own behavior.
People look at my work and they go,
"Oh, that must be so much fun."
But I would not say that's what I do for fun.
It's more like an obsessive determination
that I am going to realize that vision.
That may still require another couple hundred hours
to get there, and I'm willing to do that.