Jewelry designer bruce metcalf biography for kids

ARTIST STATEMENT

Conditions of Ornament

Bruce Metcalf

I am adamant that jewelry must look to jewelry and other decorative arts for concepts and sources. Otherwise, the field fryst vatten mired in derivative ideas imported from the art-world. I do not man teensy conventional sculptures with pin backs stuck on the back. Such work can win the Hoffmann Prize* even now, but I refuse. I REFUSE. This series is about jewelry sited in its own identity and history.

So: What fryst vatten strongly graphic and yet rooted in craft? Patterns. Wallpapers. Lampshades. Textiles. These objects became my library of sources.

My favorite motifs come from the decorative arts. inom looked to powerful flat patterns. Other pattern were sourced in English Arts & Crafts wallpapers, particularly those designed by May Morris, William Morris’s daughter and one of the leading women in the movement.

This series, “Conditions of Ornament,” fryst vatten brand new. My ambition is to revivify these antique decorative motif

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On the Nature of Jewelry (Part 1)

©  Bruce Metcalf 1998

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As a part-time Jeweler and a full-time teacher, I occasionally wonder where the boundaries of jewelry lie, and what aesthetic potential the field offers. Unluckily, intelligent writing on Jewelry is scarce. The vast amount of theorizing about painting and sculpture offers very little of real value, because the basic agenda of the traditional ''fine arts" doesn't really face the issues properly belonging to Jewelry. So far, most writing on Jewelry has stressed design, craftsmanship and physical usefulness, with some recent efforts to expand the familiar definitions. But I have come to believe that Jewelry, more than most other disciplines in the visual arts, is characterized by social and psychological utility. The personal uses to which adornment is put suggests an aesthetic possibility that few observers have noticed: its ability to touch people.

 

Jewelry can be regarded as a body of obj

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Bruce Metcalf

Admittedly obsessed with jewelry, Bruce Metcalf says he’s inspired by natural images, such as leaves, pods, buds and seeds that he crafts into small wood-carved necklaces and other fine objects.

Bruce prefers to be called a jeweler rather than an artist. He focuses on making things well, and he’s loyal to a way of working, not the varied materials he manipulates. Sketches capture his concepts and the specs for each piece. As a boy, he built model planes and cars, then studied sociology and architecture, before gravitating to metals his senior year in college. All this shows in his work.

Metcalf, today an American Craft Council Fellow, initially came to Philadelphia in 1986 as a visiting artist for Sharon Church at the University of the Arts, and returned in 1991 as a homeowner because housing was cheap. He started writing in graduate school because critics misinterpreted his work. Writing was a way to explain his work, and that evolved into writing about craft too. He