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Shael BargerJewelry
I was born and raised in the Boston, Massachusetts area, where I trained as a painter and printmaker at Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts and earned my BFA. Taking my first class in metalsmithing at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico awakened a passion for creating in silver, gold, and lapidary.
I am committed to the enhancement and exploration of my skills through personal studio work and training under other metalsmiths. I continually explore and refine my vision through use of metal and lapidary, creating texture and images. I am drawn to combining fabrication and inlay work with elements I have cast from nature – twigs, leaves, pinecones among others, introducing movement and dimension-physical and implied- into my work. Recently, after visiting New Mexico once again, I became fascinated by the intarsia (stone on stone) techniques of the Santo Domingo Pueblo artists, primarily Christopher Nieto and have developed a new line of work using intarsia to create the play of stones in silver frames. I have been doing lapidary inlay work for a number of years, usually where stone shape is defined by the cell of metal surrounding it and with this new “branch” of my work, I am redefining my design sense and letting the stones “negotiate their spatial relations with the silver frame”. Within any of the techniques I use there is a common thread- my goal is to help the stones speak – they tell me how they wish to be combined with other elements -because it is important each piece tell a story, that they are sagas in stone and metal. |