I’ve been thinking a lot about scale lately. I think many artists and makers have a scale that’s comfortable to them. Sure, most of us can and will work at different sizes throughout our careers. But most of us also have an ideal scale, one that feels like home.
Despite making jewelry the focus of my business for the past 15 years, I would say that my ideal scale is slightly larger than what the average person considers “jewelry.”
This is actually one of the reasons why I started making sculpture in graduate school. I had been making wearable pieces, and while I considered them jewelry, very few other people would.
For context, here are two of my larger “jewelry” pieces from grad school:
So I switched to making sculpture for my MFA thesis. (The other reason I decided to make sculpture was because grad school felt like the perfect time to indulge in time consuming, non-functional, difficult to sell work.)
And in the end, a lot of those shapes in my MFA thesis ended up influencing my jewelry line, proving that I could play with similar forms at different scales.
You might be wondering why I’m sharing all of this. It’s because one of the unexpected side effects of launching my new line of plant stakes is that it feels like I’m coming back to my ideal scale.
Seriously. Sitting down at my bench to make these pieces feels like sliding into a warm bath. There’s a comfort level with the size and the thickness of the metal, something that isn’t always there when I make jewelry.
This is in no way me announcing that I’m done with jewelry. Far from it. Jewelry will always be part of me and my brand.
But I love that with the plant stakes I’m getting to come back to this scale that feels so right to me.
And I’m excited to push that scale even further in the months to come! (Translation: expect some even larger indoor plant trellises in the months to come! And be sure to join my mailing list to be the first to know when they’re available!)
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