Polymer Art Archive

This is Part One of the speech delivered at Synergy: the 2008 National Polymer Clay Guild Conference held in Baltimore, Maryland last week.  The entire speech will be publish on Polymer Art Archive in serial form.
Polymer clay developed initially for making dolls and puppets but it wasn’t until it was embraced as a bead and [...]

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What do you do when you have an assortment of special beads that you finally have decided to use? Stringing up a necklace of disparate beads to achieve an attractive result is no easy feat. Yet, Victoria Hughes makes it look simple in this short, recently assembled sampler necklace that combines polymer with bits and [...]

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Here’s another treat for your viewing pleasure to tide you over until I return from the ACC Baltimore Craft Show.

When I began to think seriously about building a substantial collection of polymer art, I wanted my first purchase to be literally the cornerstone: the most significant piece I could afford by the finest artist I [...]

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Several emails have come to this blog, disputations on the general theme of “who-did-what-first.” So let me lay out for the readers who gather here how I’d like to handle this issue.

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This event remains crystallized in my mind like a fly in amber, and may have not been what happened at all… Elise and I had just finished constructing the first all  metal tube bead cutter on her deck, when we spotted a small green inch worm making its way across the deck railing. We took [...]

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There are times when the synchronicity of seeing a concept in “threes” propels me as an artist to experiment with and reinterpret an idea.

Margaret Regan gave me a fabulously simple and elegant rainbow tube bead necklace. Her beads were small and delicate ( 1/2″ x 1/8 “) and strung with small black glass hex beads on elastic.
I [...]

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While I’m in the studio filling orders today, here’s something to feast your eyes upon.
I purchased this necklace in 1997 at MIPCES from Steven Ford and David Forlano when they still worked under the name City Zen Cane.  Steven describes this piece as “transitional,” perhaps because it represents a period when they began to experiment with [...]

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When I started to plan the sequence of innovation-based articles for this site, the task seemed daunting since there were so many events to choose from.
That led me to reread Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention”, which provided helpful guidelines for making those choices. Mihaly distinguishes in his book [...]

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There is a lingering perception in our culture that wonderful art results from a spontaneous moment of inspiration. Although this may be true for some works of art, generally there is a substantial body of work and knowledge behind the artist that serve as the foundation for such success. Unlike centuries prior where skills were [...]

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Coining new words is not my specialty, but the last three posts on this site seemed to demand a descriptive term for the tiny, hand formed polymer balls used by Lori, Amy, Cynthia, Pier and others. For the purpose of uniform terminology, let’s call them “nonpareils.”                         
When I asked Amy Zinman about the technical inspiration [...]

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