[upbeat music]
- I think we're the only animal
that seems to need to ornament ourselves.
We seem to need to put things on us,
and some of us need to make things
that get put on us.
I was drawn to Philadelphia
because it was a old, industrial city
with a lot of history.
I like the landscape.
I like the vistas.
I think it's beautiful, even in its decayed state.
It offers daily visual complexity,
which, I guess, I feed on that.
It's a buffet.
It's a visual buffet for a visual thinker.
[warm music]
[birds chirping]
This field has been a design laboratory
in the middle of a very busy city.
These plants will be in a tiara that I'm creating,
called a "Tiara of Useful Knowledge."
The American Philosophical Society,
which was one of the first institutions in Philadelphia.
They wanted to promote useful knowledge.
That concept of knowing what may be important
in the future really resonated with me.
This is the milkweed plant.
The sap is a very sticky substance
that's useful for adhesive.
Bumble bees.
I've started paying attention to grasses.
Switchgrass could be used for automotive fuel.
Look at these wonderful things. [chuckles lightly]
Some people consider these weeds,
the worst weeds in the world, but I think they're beautiful.
[moody piano music]
By drawing this leaf, I'm getting an understanding
of the forms, the connections of the leaf to the stem,
it's always a surprise to me.
By looking closely at nature,
I have the best teacher possible.
I'm separating each of these leaves.
I'll glue them onto a sheet of silver.
I'm gonna get some more glue on there.
It dries pretty quickly.
[enticing bell music]
I studied art at Western Michigan University,
and one professor suggested,
"Why don't you start drawing with the saw?
Why don't you bring your art into your metal?"
[saw scraping]
This stack of drawers
is a glimpse of the journey that I've been on as an artist,
from the early '70s to last week.
This was work that I did in the early 1980s.
All of these have one rock in the necklace.
People started sending me rocks from absolutely everywhere.
This was my first clue at the power of nature.
[gentle music]
[tool grinding]
Now I'm gonna go to the rolling mill.
This is kind of like a printer's press.
Now, it's left a very subtle impression
of the veining.
I just have to get the glue and the actual leaf off.
Then you have a nice piece of silver that
is an echo of the leaf.
For about seven years,
I produced a fair amount of volume,
and I was getting some coverage in the fashion magazines.
[dramatic string music]
Then, at a certain point, I decided I needed to stop
and refuel and begin thinking about a new body of work.
That's when I started a huge amount of research
on the history of jewelry.
Seeing how it was expressed in different countries,
in different time periods.
Whether it was just a simple floral wreath,
or a skin marking, it has always been with us.
I need to look at my color photocopy
because I'm not sure exactly where that stem comes in.
Let's see.
Yeah.
Soldering.
This is the cool part.
You have two separate pieces of metal,
and by adding a piece of metal with a lower temperature,
you join them.
I've done all this research.
Then, I decided I needed to do work
that was authentic.
It had to be of its place, of its time.
So I thought, okay, now I'm gonna narrow it down,
and it's got to be within a block of my studio.
It's gonna be somewhere within this block.
It has to be here.
If it's not here, it's not real.
Is it tire treads?
Is it sidewalks?
Is it pigeons?
What am I going to use?
What am I gonna use?
I live in a neighborhood with a lot of problems,
so I thought I had to look at that.
And then I realized, here it is.
It's always at my door.
Every morning when I come in, I find a few laying there.
These little plastic containers for crack cocaine.
[playful percussion music]
About that time,
I had found a really beautiful bone necklace.
It's about a thousand years old.
It was made by a Native American.
The person had a dinner and carved it
and made an ornament.
So it was a common, readily available material.
One that was my common, readily available material,
were the crack vials.
[upbeat music]
These pieces are the plastic caps of the crack vials,
cast into gold.
As I started doing this work, people started responding to it.
Some people are troubled by it.
But I have to bring these issues up,
and it's not going to please everyone.
The survey of the sidewalk for city flotsam
could get a little depressing.
It's tough stuff.
And I asked, "What's beautiful here?"
I don't live by the Grand Canyon.
I have to find my beauty where I live.
So that's when I started to look at the weeds
across the way from the studio.
[enticing chime music]
So much of my work is the balance of man and nature.
How much will you rely upon the plants around us.
[dreamy chime music]
I'm still in the process
of working on the "Tiara of Useful Knowledge."
[dramatic music]
I think that making things with your hands,
it's a human core instinct, a really important part of us.
[gentle music]
And I think if we pay attention
to the tactile power used in craft,
we will come to realize
those are probably the best and the purest values to have.
[warm chime music]