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Her long-ago decision about how she wanted to produce jewelry demands discipline and concentration, and a sure, steady hand as she knits and wraps her way along the wire, fabricating it into an instrument of wondrous adornment.
A simple line of wire in silver or gold transcends itself in the hands of Mary Lee Hu, as she plaits, twines, knits, and braids its length into woven forms of unassailable beauty. She has kept to this practice since she discovered early that weaving in metal is what she was meant to do. It would be her life’s work, a satisfying way of achieving aesthetic fulfillment for now approaching fifty years as a studio jeweler and metalsmith.
She says that she is playing games with wire; if so then Hu provokes the response that creating from a void is some very serious form of gaming, perhaps similar to how human sentience developed so many millennia ago on this planet.
Her artworks in jewelry are evidence that the extraordinary power of humans to create is an amazing accomplishment and a reminder of the still untapped potential of our species as makers. It is astonishing how little we are aware
of this ever-present fact as we live the hours and days and years of a personal lifetime experiencing the world. Somehow we have … (More) 
New Medium
jewelry arts
Polymer clay had a good year in 2011. The fruits of Elise Winters’s Polymer Collection Project finally came to bear when the largely-celebrated Terra Nova: Polymer Art at the Crossroads exhibition opened at the Racine Art Museum in October. Winters’s Polymer Collection Project, aided by polymer artists such as Rachel Carren (whose work is oddly missing from the show), Lindly Haunani, Nan Roche, Carol Watkins, and others, aimed to increase awareness of polymer as an art medium both on the museum level and amongst the general public, by placing polymer works into major museums’ permanent collections.
While the Racine was the largest recipient of pieces from this effort, the Polymer Collection Project also brought polymer into the hands of other museums across the country. San Diego’s Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park was among these, receiving a substantial number of works for their permanent collection.
It is a selection of these objects, along with a number of others pulled from the recently-acquired Bead Museum collection, that are on display in New Jewelry in a New Medium, showing at the Mingei through June 17, 2012.…(More)
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Our upcoming issue contains...
Bolo Ties
Patrik Kusek
Carol Lee Shanks
Andes Costume and Jewelry
Traveler’s Market
Feast of Beads
Some of Our Popular Articles
Smithsonian Craft Show 2012THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY
National Building Museum
Washington, D.C
April 19 – 22, 2012
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