24 years ago we bought a house with a half acre rolling landscape. I convinced my husband Dave, (an avid gardener and landscape architect) that he would never find another opportunity to have a bucolic backyard in this part of town. It was down the street from a lake and 10 minutes from downtown Dallas. At our previous home I had gardened a fair amount but this landscape was daunting to me. My husband started by creating outdoor rooms while I obsessed about the indoor rooms.
My studio is at home and has a wall of windows overlooking the garden so it is always in my peripheral vision. It took many years before I realized the impact this plant library was having on my work. While my jewelry references organic forms, it is not a literal representation of nature - it's more like an allusion or homage to nature. Sometimes when I'm struggling with an idea, I'll walk in the garden trying to get clarity and see a trailing vine that probably was the genesis of the piece I'm working on even though I'd never made the exact connection between the two. I'll cut the vine and put it up on my wall to remember the quality it has that I'm trying to capture. My love of stylized plant forms also harkens back to my reverence for Matisse and Ellsworth Kelly and their exquisitely simple plant drawings.
The February/ March issue of Garden and Gun Magazine did an article on our garden. I'm posting this a bit after the fact but it gives a sense of my work environment. I'm also posting the view from my studio door because it is what I see when I look away from my worktable and reboot my brain.
My view