Bead Society of Orange County

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Pawel Kaczynski - Structure and Surface

Pawel Kaczynski has been designing and making fabulous jewelry for over 25 years. His “Structure and Surface” series resulted from focused experimentation with gold-smithing techniques. Kaczynski’s bracelets and necklaces are metal mesh transformed with folding and pigment. The pieces are pretty spectacular!

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Emily Miranda - statement-making, jaw-dropping seashell jewelry

Emily Miranda makes cuff bracelets, necklaces, and earrings using barnacles, shells, snails, rhinestones, and freshwater pearls. That’s really quite an understatement. If Neptune presented you with a bracelet, it would be from this collection. This jewelry turns heads!

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Ulli Kaiser - Combining Disciplines with a Touch of Silver

Ulli Kaiser does some extraordinary bead crochet. To do it well and be successful, you must rethink how you will express yourself with this medium. Kaiser has combined silversmithing with her bead crochet. Combining disciplines enhances and elevates the artistic value of work. In Kaiser’s case, adding the fabricated silver to the beading did just that.

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Kaori Juzu - a constant dialogue with the hand, metal, and enamel

Jewelry artist Kaori Juzu creates enamel work built on layers of color. Her process creates serene and subdued pieces, yet it is strong enough to take on life and form. Juzu refers to this intensive process as enamelism, as it unfolds in a constant dialogue with the hand, metal, and enamel.

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Karin Roy Andersson - Multiplicity

Karen Roy Andersson’s work employs the urge to repeat movements repeatedly, very methodically. The variations between the details become important, creating patterns and rhythms. Many of her pieces take inspiration from nature. Fish, birds, plants, and landscapes seem to dominate. Andersson’s non-figurative interpretation gives space for much fertile ground to cover. She also uses recycled materials in her work. Industrial plastics, as well as reindeer skin, are frequently repurposed. Reindeer skin is an elastic, strong material often not utilized after the slaughter. Andersson takes this material using her heritage of traditional leather work and fashions it into breathtaking dark-edged disks for bracelets, necklaces, and brooches. The image, top left, shows the reindeer skin material. For something completely different, the image, bottom right, shows a brooch made of apple seeds.

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Jounghye Park - exquisite creations in silk

Jounghye Park has been researching combining fiber and metal materials to create new jewelry forms. She is drawn to silk for its countless color possibilities and near-weightlessness—ideal for her jewelry, emphasizing size and volume. After dyeing the silk, she makes small units that resemble the roots, stems, shrubs, berries, and plants’ thorns. For Park, plants are beautiful and mysterious, capable of transporting her outside of herself, and it is this feeling that she seeks to share through her jewelry. The image, bottom right, shows the cutting process of Park’s silk elements.

2Roses
Monday's Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Eunhee Cho - a contemporary expression of traditional Jiseung Craft

Eunhee Cho is a jewelry designer based in Seoul, South Korea. Her work style reinterprets Korean traditional craft elements in a modern way. Cho's pieces are made of Hanji, a handmade paper of the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera.) Hanji is well-ventilated, tough, and has excellent preservation. Jiseung Craft refers to a traditional Korean craft technique in which Hanji is cut into thin and long pieces, rubbed with fingertips, and twisted into a double string to make various objects. Hanji is woven into a single string, then a double string, and made into a three-dimensional object. It has excellent durability enough to maintain its shape even if wet, and above all, it is very light.

Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Christel van der Laan - how to really explore a concept

Metalsmiths will immediately recognize the material used in many of Christel van der Laan’s jewelry pieces. It’s the ceramic honeycomb used to secure metal elements during the soldering process. Many of you have seen her iconic botanical brooch of the dual-leafed twigs (shown top, left.) Van der Laan’s body of work is very inventive, well-executed, and exceptionally appealing. We wanted to emphasize her ability to take a concept and really explore it. Just when you think she’s exhausted any further possibilities with the ceramic honeycomb, you’re completely blown away with work that includes semi-precious stones, wood, found objects, and other alternative materials.

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Karin Johansson - and the sense of scale

Karin Johansson was born in Sweden and currently works and lives in Gothenburg. She is one of the founders of the international jewelry gallery Hnoss in Gothenburg, later the Hnoss Initiative. Between 2007 and 2019, she was the head of department/professor of the Jewelry Art department at HDK Academy of Design and Crafts Gothenburg University.

What caught our eye was her sense of scale, shown in the two images on the right. Her pieces have an overall simplicity that can easily become more complex. The two brooches composed of enameled tubes shown left demonstrate that quite well.

Don't miss the 28th annual Art of Adorning at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, sponsored by the Bead Society of Orange County. Artisan vendors will sell hand-crafted jewelry, beads, clothing, textiles, components, craft tools, and supplies!

2Roses
Monday's Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Sílvia Serra Albaladejo - contact with the industrial object

Jewelry artist Sílvia Serra Albaladejo uses industrial and commercial materials to communicate to the wearer and viewer in a symbolic language. In the artist's words," Our relationship to the industrial object is functional; with a work of art, it is semi-religious; to handicraft, it is corporeal. It is really not a relationship, but a contact."

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Silvia Furmanovich - Amazing Marquetry

The technique of Marquetry has become of interest to the polymer clay community in recent years. Artist/designer Silvia Furmanovich has taken botanical themes from her native Brazil and transformed them into adornments beyond words. Native wood is painstakingly veneered, shaped, and placed to create jewelry and evening bags that show wonderful imagination and exquisite craftsmanship. She’s taken wood adornment, typically pigeonholed as hobbyist, and has elevated it to fine art.

The pieces are modeled after real-life flower and plant species that Furmanovich encounters during woodland trips and excursions, such as banana flowers, begonia leaves, calla lilies, orchids, and even multi-colored mushrooms.

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Beppe Kessler - Little Treasures

Beppe Kessler is an internationally renowned artist who works in painting, sculpture, and jewelry. She is an abstractionist and a specialist in research and using alternative materials.

Kessler refers to her work as Little Treasures, miniature sculptures composed of natural, vintage, and contemporary materials. Alpaca, silver, horn, mother of pearl, blood coral, silk, textile, photographs, acrylic, plant materials, resin, and seeds are used in her pieces.

2Roses
Monday’s Child - A Weekly Creative Shot in the Arm

Diana Chelminsky - the transformation of the disposable and unnecessary

Jewelry artist Diana Chelminsky travels the road of contrasts. Organic and synthetic, hard and soft, the crafted and the found are combined with traditional metalsmithing techniques. The resulting pieces show a unique transformation of the disposable and unnecessary. According to the artist, they represent a moment in thought about how we refer to our surrounding world.

Chelminsky uses an extensive array of materials. Epoxy, silver, photos, threads, wood, brass, watch glass, and preserved plant material are just a few of them.

"Meat Grinder," Gold ring with coral,
1924