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TRANSFORMING THE EARTH 3 WAYS
from left: Larimar pendant by Nancy Foo; A. Saylor’s breathtaking shot of the Little Colorado; and Joni Pevarnik’s functional pottery are examples of the work featured this month at the Artists’ Gallery.
BY SARAH GIANELLI
The “Calla” series from Judith Skinner is among the notable
works of craft & art at the Gallery In Williams.
This month, The Artists’ Gallery features three artists who draw their materials and inspiration from the earth and transform
them into art through the mediums of jew- elry, photography and pottery.
In addition to her full time job as the fi- nancial counselor for radiation therapy at the hospital, Nancy Foo has been making jewelry for over 30 years, beginning with the rock tumbler she was given as a child, and going on to join the Lapidary Club in junior high, where she learned how to cut stones.
Her pendants, beaded necklaces, rings, ear- rings and bracelets fall into three distinct col- lections. Her “textured earth” series includes any pieces that are hand etched, imprinted through the rolling mill, or shaped over a dap- pingblock. Her“jeweledearth”piecesfeature stone centerpieces; and her “wire work” incor- porates beads, hand twisted silver chains, and hand crafted decorative clasps.
For her copper pendants, part of Ms. Foo’s “textured earth” line, she draws mountains, canyons and trees on the metal with a spe- cial ink resist before soaking it in a ferric chlo- ride bath, which eats away the exposed cop-
per and creates a relief of the image.
A Laminar pendant, its blue-green oceanic hue reminiscent of the Dominican Republic from which it hails, is accented with small stone beads woven one by one into the silver chain. Another of her “jeweled earth” pieces in a similar style features Amazonite and fresh water pearls. In college, Ms. Foo started out as a graphic design major, but when as- signed to do a large portrait, she knew she was in the wrong creative field. “I don’t like working big,” she says. “I like working small, and I like working three dimensional.” Ms. Foo soon traded graphic design at ASU for the jewelry program at NAU.
“I love working with my hands ... and with stones,” she adds. “When you get a stone, whether it’s a rough or a finished stone, it’s
like ‘wow, this came from the ground!’ This seagulls; and has a repertoire that spans & oranges abundant in the functional, high
rough piece that was just kind of brown or blah, when finished, the colors are incredible. And you can have the same stone but no two will ever be alike. And there’s just an infinite amount of stones out there, and always new types being found. It’s amazing.”
Meeting A. Saylor, I found it amusing that this highly intelligent, articulate young woman seemed a little nervous about being interviewed. In a world saturated with imag- ery, and everyone dabbling in the medium through their cellphones, it can be difficult for a professional photographer to find a market for their work. Ms. Saylor’s photog- raphy, like many area shutterbugs, focuses on Northern Arizona scenery, but she has found a way to distinguish her work from the masses.
“It has me in it,” she says. “It has my experi- ence and my feelings — my sense of place. Most of these places are very special to me ... so I hope my connection to that place is what makes them special and sets them apart. There are a lot of great photographers out there, you just gotta make them your own.”
This comes across quite viscerally in Toward Heaven, a shot of towering Oak trees that were burned brilliant white in the 2010 Schul- tz Fire, with a crisp blue sky in the background.
“My whole goal is to capture a feeling more than just an image,” she says. “I remem- ber that being a particularly hard day for me personally, so I climbed up that hill and there was a little bit of victory, relief and catharsis getting up there and finding these beautiful trees that I had no idea existed, and to get down on the ground, which really makes you a part of the scene, and try to compose exactly what I was feeling for somebody else, which isn’t an easy thing to do.”
Ms. Saylor is venturing into printing on metal when the image lends itself, such as her only non-Arizona image of shoreline
sunflowers, sunsets and streams, but her favorite subject matter is storms — pre, dur- ing and post. While she typically shoots four times a week, during monsoon season she is out every day. In one electric shot of lightening crackling on the horizon across a field out at Wupatki, she waited through the treacherous weather for the moment to strike. Although she shoots digital, Ms. Taylor is a purist in many ways. She doesn’t have a
“lightning cam” which automatically snaps the shot at the opportune moment, and she does the bare minimum of editing.
Because Ms. Saylor believes everyone should be able to take home a piece of art if they really love it, she offers a variety of prints that are accessible to every budget.
Artists’ Gallery Director Joni Pevarnik may be a potter by trade, but likely graced the stage in a previous life or in a universe paral- lel to this one. Switching between an Irish lilt, the voice of an old Yiddish woman, and a cowboy twang amongst others, Ms. Pevar- nik was more entertainer than interviewee. When she started out at NAU, Ms. Pevarnik thought she wanted to be a Spanish major, but after taking a class with Don Bendel, founder of the university’s ceramics program, she was hooked.
“For him, making art is life,” says Ms. Pevar- nik. “It’s not just about making things; he’s more of a philosopher. He made you partici- pate —if you were just sitting around he’d make you move bricks. Pretty soon you real- ized it was a Japanese aesthetic about being present and participating. In the meantime you learned a lot about pottery.”
Four years later Ms. Pevarnik graduated with a BFA in ceramics. In the beginning, she made standard brown pots, but she loved color, and when she met her husband Steve Pevarnik, also a potter, he hand-built kilns and she started experimenting with glazes, giving way to the bright blues, purples, reds
fired, porcelain pottery she makes today.
She uses a copper glaze to achieve the bril-
liant reds and purples in her work. Firing the pieces in a reduction atmosphere (depriving the kiln of oxygen), the carbon bonds with oxygen molecules in the glaze, thus chang- ing the color. She uses rutile to get an opal- escent effect; cobalt for the blues, and uses a variety of firing techniques and kilns to cre- ate different textures and markings; and for her decorative Raku pieces, finishes them in a bed of smoking pine needles.
“It’s always a mystery,” says Ms. Pevarnik. “You have a bit of control; how you make the piece, how you design the piece, how you glaze the piece, but once you glaze it, every firing’s different. My favorite thing is when I
hold my cup, and I feel it. Sometimes I’m like, ‘wow I made that’ — isn’t that a trip? And it’s
going to be around long after I’m dead.”
Visit The Artists’ Gallery during First Friday ArtWalk, 6-9PM June 6 at 17 North San Fran- cisco Street to see the work of these featured artists and more. flagstaffartistsgallery.com
It was difficult to keep Ms. Pevarnik on the subject of her pottery because of an exciting, summer-long project she is spearheading called Art on the Square. If you missed last month’s first artist demo event, artists from 6 downtown galleries, including The Artists Gallery, West of the Moon, Arizona Hand- made, Erica Vhay Gallery, Shane Knight Gallery & Urban Nest will be presenting demonstrations & selling their work, along with a different musical act and/or street per- formance each week. flagstaffartgalleries.
There are still openings for individual art- ists who would like to participate (email sjpe- varnik@yahoo.com).
Art on the Square is 11AM-3PM Sundays in Heritage Square.
Have art? | arts@thenoise.us
18 • JUNE 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us