The Jewelry of Glenda Arentzen

Although two years ago Arentzen's 25-year retrospective at Faber was critically acclaimed, the spring show challenged her to reach beyond past successes. "This was different from other shows," she said. "When we were setting the date, the people at the gallery encouraged me. They said, 'make the stuff that speaks to your heart, and we'll sell it.'"

While welcoming the freedom to create a collection without the commercial constraint of satisfying budgets or tastes of potential customers, Arentzen also recognized that some determinants in the normal process of design had been eliminated. "Ordinarily, when I'm organizing a show for a gallery or a big fair, I take a concept and expand it by trying to make accessories for certain prices and occasions, for shorter or taller people. Although I was still concerned with wearability, this work was not made for the market but in the service of an idea."

Permission to follow her intuition led her to concentrate on a few major works but to forego "drop-dead exhibition pieces" in favor of "things that were smaller and quieter, that made a statement, pleasant or not. Stones were used sparingly and usually seemed to emerge from the colors of the metal around them, rather than to assert an independent presence. The gallery's directive also allowed the simplicity that best exploits the use of 24k gold, which in combination with 14k gold and sometimes silver is contained in a fifth of the pieces. Most often, it occurs in unpretentious, almost casual forms that subtly glow in relation to the metals around it. "It has a warmth that leads the eye in, with a lot of impact in a wonderful way," Arentzen observed.

Although she seemed a bit concerned that, technically, the jewelry world would find nothing new in the show, it does reflect her efforts to deal with some problematic aspects of this softest, purest gold. "There's no place to hide the rough spots; fittings have to be perfect because you can't file away the excess." To offset its softness, she Found she could back it with a thin layer of a different gold.

As a spinoff from the show, she intends to continue working with the contrast between 24k gold and other metals. In particular, she wants to pursue a series of pins she refers to as "secrets." Suggestive of samples from the layers of a wooded terrain, these are made with fragmentlike shapes of 24k gold, loosely set in frames and repousséd in a way that both hides and reveals stones and other elements just beneath the surface. "Although we live in an earring culture, pins are the things that lend themselves to themes," Arentzen said. "They are more easily perceived as fine art, and most readily related to the framed form."

She also expressed a special satisfaction with several earrings and pins in which wire gridlike structures held what appeared to be casually formed "shards" of 24k gold. Lightly held in place, they were reminiscent of leaves blown into bramble bushes. "They're like impressions of the flotsam and jetsam of life," she observed. "The geometric wires could be seen as a manmade way of trying to pull something organic together."

In striving for elemental qualities, Arentzen has become aware of certain forms with universal appeal. "All kinds of people have a positive emotional reaction to a wide ring that encloses the finger," she noted. Even when her rings are as dramatic as Landscape, a disc that rests on three fingers like a lily pad, the fit of the unseen band is a critical component. However, she also made a choker designed to feel constricting - "like you're jumping out of your skin" - that seems to contradict her usual regard for comfort. This piece emerged from her experience of feeling the press of life's demands from many different directions.

Between the cases of jewelry on the gallery walls hung several finger-painted works on paper, executed with sweeps of black paint and gold-leaf, veiled with tracing paper. "A lot of those are sketches that later may turn out in wax," she said, alluding to the paintings as "background noise." The brisk strokes and swirls suggested warmup exercises for the linear patterns, the ridges and incisions carved in the wax Arentzen prepares for casting. "Drawing is where the idea becomes tangible for the first time. It may be just a reference, but it tells a lot about the way you work."

For Arentzen, casting is a critical tool for making textured parts, which she later assembles, interspersing them with smooth components. She values the handmade quality of the wax units that sometimes carry fingerprints or drops of melted wax into the metal. Her reliance on casters in New York is a major drawback in living far away from the city. The easy procedure of delivering wax locally and picking up the metal on the same day has been replaced with a mail-order system that takes two weeks to complete. The time gap, however, has not vet discouraged Arentzen from using this approach to working out her ideas.

Noticeably absent from the recent show were the elegant, sleekly sophisticated, geometric-patterned forms that Arentzen had perfected, using colors achieved through patination in the married-metals technique. Two years ago, an article in Ornament discussed this work, along with Arentzen's conviction that their complex, pieced-fabrication served as a refreshing complement to the textured work. Arentzen's present distance from casting facilities suggests that this might have been the logical direction to follow, but her ideas have moved away from it. "I've nearly stopped doing it, not because I feel negative about it, but because I'm finished with it. I resisted the temptation to do it; the fat, graphic quality didn't seem as important as the landscape ideas."

Perhaps a key to the vitality of Arentzen's work is that, in addition to continually scrutinizing and reflecting on the visual world, she also keeps her inner sense of texture and pattern alive by a regular routine of both tap and ice dancing. With the exhibition's opening behind her, she was looking forward to her 50th birthday, an occasion for a carwheel. Predictably, the embodied memory of that arc in space will someday find expression in gold.

Notes

1. Smith, Dido, "Glenda Arentzen's Magic Metal," Craft Horizons, February 1976.
2. Blauer, Ettagale, "Glenda Arentzen: Contemporary Goldsmith," Ornament, 12 (3), 1989.

Patricia Malarcher is a fiber artist and craft critic.