Referential Soup

Hawthorne Cultural Center

After a whirlwind week or two, I am back in Austin. My trip to Philly was fraught with disasters --- my cab came to my house an hour late so I missed my flight!


So....Philadelphia. Such an American city: so many people crammed together, a little bit ornery. So many shapes and colors and styles and textures, so much trash on the streets. So much hardwork, so many bums drinking hooch out of paper bags on the stoops of churches. Produce trucks, taquerias, outdoor markets, Italian cheese and sausage stores, cute students in Catholic school uniforms, kids running around cussing in the neighborhoods. The Cambodian neighborhood of South Philly looks like a mini-Cambodian city now, with the buildings and businesses changed and recycled, reinvented, dotted with satellite dishes, decorated in beautiful script. Delapidated but vibrant, the city of Philadelphia.

 Italian Market

Old, delapidated house near the Broad Street Subway Terminal in South Philly - I really want to know who lives here

More mosaics by Isaiah Zagar

Isaiah Zagar's mosaics are all over South Philly, which is something I really love about the neighborhood. Most of the time, they are on the walls of businesses or community organizations, but some lucky people appear to have them on their houses: a dream of mine. I LOVE mosaic artwork in cities: I love how it breaks apart the monotony of concrete and brick, asphalt and iron. I love that it shows us that no matter what, cities are built, maintained, and grown by the people who live in them, and by what is important to those citizens.

A closed and abandoned city pool off the Italian Market - No running, diving, horseplay

Beautifully carved frontispiece for the closed pool. Makes you wonder why they just don't reopen it?

Despite all the concrete, there is lots of color

Luckily for me, my friends took me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the Roberto Capucci exhibit, which was amazing!!! I was so inspired by the dresses there that I immediately wanted to see if I could recreate all those pleats and folds and fans in metal. Of course, I have no studio (yet) in Philly, so I had to wait.....His dresses are so wild and crazy - sometimes even too wild and crazy for me! But, I found them architecturally incredible: as if the layers of fabric were just balancing on each other, held together in the air, floating. This is why I have to try and create something similar for myself. 

Don't you want to know what it does?

So on Sunday, my friend took me to Lambertville, New Jersey, a very lovely little town just a hop, skip and a jump from Philadelphia. We went through the most amazing flea market that I have ever been to; we kept walking and I kept gawking until I had to stop and turn away. There were so many beautiful things, and so cheap!!! The excitement of being able to furnish our new house by fleaing got to me and visions of an amazing antiquey-junque house swirled in my head. Just think: enamel-topped tables! Display cabinets! Russian china! Strange, hazey old photographs! Cabbage-shaped teacups! Old steel cabinets! The possibilities really are endless....

I have been kicking myself for not buying this every day since I got back

Box of dolly heads with eyes that open and shut? Check!

These last 5 images were all from the same vendor, who, when I told him I was a jeweler, pulled out tons of photos of jewelry made with the strange objects he sells. He seemed thrilled to be part of the jewelry process, and this made me like him even more than his insanely reasonable prices! 

Our last stop was in Lambertville, proper, for a tour of the town. My favorite spot was the amazing jewelry gallery of Tom Castor, whose incredible mixtures of iron, gold, diamonds and silver were, well, fantastic. I had a really great time talking about jewelry with him, and he was very sweet and let us try on anything we wanted, including a $78,000 green and black diamond and platinum ring. Pretty fantastic! Nothing beats his mixed-metals combinations....I would love to work for him. 'Tis a dream to learn how to do all of that.....and his pave is incredible.

All in all, I came back refreshed from my vacation, a little unnerved by the prospect of actually moving across the country and uprooting my entire life, but excited, too. I like the idea of making jewelry in a new city, and I like the idea of living in a huge city and getting used to that. I like the idea of having picnics in Fairmount Park, and cycling through city streets that are laid out as bike lanes.

I am really inspired to make jewelry right now, and it is a good thing as I have three custom orders sitting on the workbench right now: a bracelet, a ring and a pair of earrings. Let's see how Philly inspires this new season of creativity!