catch-all

I. BACKGROUND
For years I’ve picked up bits of wire on walks around old ranch land in southern Colorado, mostly baling and barbed wire. The barbed wire I stow by fence posts out of harm’s way; the tangled and flattened strands of other wire I take back to the cabin. Some of it I find so alluring I hang it on the cabin wall. The first useful thing I make from my stash of wire is a pair of dowsing rods.

I have three kitchen objects that belonged to my Grandma Bess who kept chickens–two of her egg baskets and a strange-looking contraption to lift pies from the oven. The fourth wire object I keep is an egg separator–an ingenious and lovely coiled “spoon.”

II. FOREGROUND
It is the inviting possibilities of Jennifer Heath’s show, Resurrections: ECO-logy and ECO-nomy: A Functional Trash-Art Exhibition that make me realize I have a real affection for wire. I begin my ECO-exploration inspired by these marvelous and hand made kitchen heirlooms and a pile of unwanted wire coat hangers. Already as I make things, I am influenced to seek out more interesting and elegant shapes in the containers of food & goods I buy. Already I am looking to their future, to their continuing as something useful and beautiful. This is wonderful in itself – this sense of continuity and invention. The tender regard I feel for these homemade things is unexpected.