"Keepsakes"

Quintessentially my work is about feelings. The representations of my feelings diverge, whether it be dealing with my family, landscapes, or portraits. These pieces I’ve created are the visual transformation of my feelings. My work is my reflections on who I am, questioning and searching for my identity through the creative process.

As a child I used art as an escape, as a way to spend time alone with my imagination. Today I still use art as a space for creative seclusion, as well as a time and a “place” for coping with reality. My pieces are harmonious and angelically idealized reflections on life, places and people.

Portraiture, landscapes, nostalgia and ancestry are several main themes I’m dealing with in my work. Portraiture and landscapes are two traditional, principal genres in art history, which I study and frequently reference. I am attempting to create intimate and modern keepsakes of moments and memories that are influenced by classical forms.

I implore decorative elements inspired by traditional jewelry, decorative architectural elements, apparel detailing, china, and other found objects. I find this detailing brings preciousness to the work that the materials I use don’t always imply. The ideas of nostalgia, femininity, and sentimentality are of great importance to me. I explore portraiture; with an interest in family lineage and femininity expressed through drawings and photographs. The use of the portrait and landscape are both means of dealing with personal identity and intimate places, moments and people, creating and capturing my life.

I am my father’s daughter.

I am my mother’s daughter.

While growing up I was surrounded by iconography, historical imagery, and cultural artifacts, which my parents collected and displayed in the house. Whether or not I consciously choose it or not, my childhood environment has played a large role in my life and work today. Religious iconography has found its way into my work, influencing my forms, use of color, and compositional aesthetic properties. This usage of iconography represents, and is inspired by my mother, who since my birth has placed upon me a Christian religious upbringing.

My father’s career is in the collecting, dealing and cataloging of British antiquities. My use of history, and historical figures, especially English, is inspired by my father. Ever since I can remember I grew up surrounded by numismatic and historical imagery, literature and artifacts. I realize that there are large connections between my attraction for small portraiture, coins, history, enameling, and my current work.

I have been strongly influenced in the use of emamel in my metalwork at RISD by having spent three and a half years of my undergraduate study devoted to enameling; and I believe that enameling as a process and medium will forever influence me. The history of enamel is long and intertwined with the history of art, jewelry, and portraiture. Enamel has a past seeped in religious and historical artifacts.

Although I have moved away from enamel as my primary material of choice, its influence is still very much present. In retrospect, my themes and choices of materials and process formulate a clear picture, and I can see a direct path of thinking and strikingly austere connections. However, as is most often the case, it did not feel that simple and direct as a creative process, yet I enjoy and appreciate making these connections of historical reference, materials, and themes, albeit after the fact.

Faux Cameos

This series explores the complexities of relationships within the family and the self. This series started with the brooch entitled King, which is a portrait of my youngest brother, Tim. Months before starting work for my thesis my brother Tim was involved in a near-fatal accident. Confronted with the most searing pain, anger, confusion and fear I have ever experienced, things changed. During those weeks of uncertainty after the initial shock, I was able to gain a new perspective and appreciation for my life and family. A month or so into recovery I had made a portrait drawing from life of Tim, which I added a crown to. The crown seemed all too appropriate for such a strong and newly noble and blessed person. With the fear and threat of death, childhood innocence in a sense was lost, but also immortalized. I later saw this as a relationship to the young king Edward VI of England, while reading I Elizabeth, the historical fiction of Elizabeth the 1st. Elizabeth reflects upon how her little brother Edward had changed after gaining the rule and govern of their nation, a seemingly premature death of his joys of adolescence, caused by responsibility, power, sickness and the reality of mortality and fear. The implied relationship with history and royalty in the brooch King led to the development of the development of the series which I call Fiction (discussed next).

Spending so much time in the pediatric intensive care unit was a trying and sad experience. This was a time of uncertainty, questioning, and confusion, for not only the question of life and death was in the air, but of life and purpose and meaning. After the likes of such an emotional time, art and personal ambition of the creative spirit seemed all too frivolous. “Jesus, help me find my proper place.” These are the lyrics from a song from the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground, the Sixties and other favorite lyrics were of inspiration and influence at this time. I see the sixties and that era’s use of idealized and stylized imagery borrowed from Art Nuevo as a direct link to the over-dramatized emotive quality of the drawings in the pieces in this series. Songs are a natural component to my work, process, and life because of their ability to comfort, motivate, medicate, and meditate.

The processes I use in this series along with the quality of my lines have a similarity to that of the art of scrimshaw. I like this liaison between my process and that of the mariner’s craft, for it only strengthens the notion of the keepsake. I have found great inspiration, and charm, in researching scrimshaw and other such folk traditions.

The cameo is a portrait and a keepsake of an ideal or a loved one. I used the techniques similar to that of creating a cameo, carving and scratching. However they are in a sense faux because they are made out of plastic, not the traditional shell or another natural material. I believe this fakeness also derives from my overly romantic notions, although if this is true all cameos are then in a sense fake or faux. I feel the use of plastic in this series brings these pieces into the modern world, which is necessary, for they are commemorating people and personal, intensly private notions from the present 2006. I believe the impression of the sense of age that these pieces get from their format is impervious, for the nature of love, pain and remembrance is nothing new.

Fiction

I am interested in creating a fictitious family history. My interest in fabricating an imitation or fantasy ancestry stems from my limited knowledge of my actual family narrative. My father was adopted, and my knowledge of my mother’s side of the family only goes back a few generations. I know that my grandmother’s mother was Irish and her father Swedish and my Grandfather’s mother English and his father German.

Although I feel from appearance it is fair to say the lineage on my fathers side is of most if not all-European descent, with this limited partial knowledge of my lineage I have taken the liberty in fabricating past relations. In my series Fiction, I have taken photos of my immediate family members and placed them in varying historical contexts, creating an apparitional family lineage, and a sense of a past built upon newly fabricated objects.

During the conception of this series I was looking at many books on the history of fashion and jewelry. While perusing these books I became fascinated with the evolution of style, in particular the extravagant volumes in hairstyles. Incorporated in this series are drawings juxtaposing hair and period-type dress with pieces, or personal imagery, in an attempt to investigate and discus the evolution of style.

Queen Anna’s Lace

When I was little my mother and I would take walks in the fields and woods around our home to pick and collect wild flowers to take home. My favorite was Queen Anne’s lace which she called Queen Anna’s Lace.

A Sitting with History

When looking at the history of jewelry you are often times looking at jewelry being worn. The people wearing the jewelry are often times people of historical significance. They are most times historically important figures like Queen Elizabeth or Anne of Cleves. Or they are people of a more cultural influence, images from art history, representing the fashions and culturally influential people of that time. Later in history, when photography became more affordable for the masses, you will find that the people wearing the work will not be anyone of a real specific historical importance, or even be presented with a known name or identity, rather a visual history of everyday fashions, style and culture.

I have found these representations very interesting. My series A Sitting with History is a selection of photographs documenting my jewelry work through portraits inspired by this idea of representation. I am loosely referencing specific images from art history to base my portraits upon. I am creating a similar representation of documentation to mimic and emulate history, in a way giving a false sense of a past to my very new and modern jewelry, creating an heirloom narrative within my work. The images I have chosen are not necessarily images chosen for their link to the representation of jewelry, for actually many are not even wearing jewelry in the originals. I chose them for their historical time frame, specific fashions, aesthetic qualities, and persons.

Landscapes

I am using landscapes to represent travel, passage, and memory. My intention for my landscape pieces is to evoke and capture fleeting memories of space and environment. These selected segments of landscapes are captured and isolated in soft white decoration to emphasize their preciousness and to create a token or a keepsake of these memories. I believe I am going back to familiar places and ideas because I’m feeling a little lost and out of place, not knowing were I stand, were my place in the world is.

I employ these landscapes to evoke feelings of familiarity and sentimentality in hopes of creating a sense of comfort and peace. I enjoy the idea of seeing something beautiful and wanting to take a piece of it with you. Jewelry in many ways is the embodiment of this idea, along with the adorning of the self, the re-placement of beauty.

Nostalgia

When thinking about home, domesticity and memorabilia, I refer back to collections I gather from, both of mine and of my parents. My parents have many collections, books, rugs, stamps, and coins, textiles, china, miniatures, and family heirlooms. I refer back to a group of postcards that I have collected since I was a teenager, along with collections kept in sketchbooks of imagery, patterns, clippings, and other bits of information I found interesting. I have come to realize the influence my parents’ aesthetic choices have had on me. I react to their taste in two opposing ways. On one side I reflect with a sense of nostalgia, family heritage, and a sense of belonging. On the other end I find myself strongly rejecting the connection to this source. I pick and choose what I wish to remember and reference in a somewhat subconscious attempt to embellish, and idealize. I revisit the past, reinventing the old.

In this series of brooches and rings, whcih I simply call Nostalgia, I recall Childhood, fairytales, family, and life, through the use of sewing, decorating, embellishing, and constructing. I make these pieces in remembrance of things past and present. I enjoy the use of symbols, such as birds to represent freedom, emotion, and the creative process. I find myself very attracted to the color white, along with its close color relative of the pale persuasion. I feel that white is a symbol of innocence, purity and truth. I think it’s important to be honest with yourself in the creative process, and that there is something pure about creation.

Textiles have a unique and long history of storytelling, with the ability to be familiar to everyone as a part of our visual and domestic culture. I relate this use of textiles and materials to these meanings, also in reference to woman’s work, my mother, and the women in our family. My mother is probably responsible for my interest in sewing, craft materials, drawing and painting, because she is the one who first taught me how to do these things, and supported me being creative. While I was growing up, my mother always had little projects planed for me, to teach me how to sew, crochet, etcetera. It makes sense to me that, in my work, this woman’s work processes can stand in for a symbol of my mother herself.

Elaine Scarry wrote that ‘The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph but simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later--as long as the bird is there to be beheld. People follow the paths of migrating birds, moving strangers, and lost manuscripts, trying to keep the thing sensory present to them.

I present this quote in relation to my thinking about my jewelry, for its discussion of beauty. I feel that my pieces are translating and keeping the emotive essence of beauty, and encapsulating a part of it so that you are able to carry it with you. In a sense, this is arts highest ambition---for art captures the essence of what it means to be alive, whether yesterday, today or tomorrow.

Anna Lorich 2006