Artist Spotlight - Joselle Vanderhooft

Back to A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

(See the Fragile Dialects Jewelry Gallery for pictures and details.)

Ok. Tell us a little about this piece (or both).

I'd be happy to talk about both!

When you initially put out the call for people to design jewelry for A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, I started thinking about each poem in detail, to see if any particular images or colors immediately came to mind. This is generally how I work when designing a piece of jewelry, particularly if the piece is to go along with a poem, story or novel - I take whatever my brain throws out first and I go with it. Usually, my first instinct is right.

"Inhumed Her Star-Staked Body Bloodless Lies" has always had a particular color palate for me - blue ice, brown earth and the red, pulsing heart of the heifer the lovers joke about using to stain their wedding sheets. Muddy ice, though, so things like blue jade and blue topaz (which I dislike, incidentally) wouldn't cut it. Iolite, on the other hand, was perfect. And while I wanted to use dark amber to offset the blue, I found that the smoky quartz beads were more the color I had in mind. I was overjoyed when I found the pewter separator beads - I think they look a bit like coffin nails. I had enough materials left over after, so I also made a bracelet and earring set. This has to be the most involved, difficult and time-consuming jewelry project I've done yet!

The necklace for Rampion is another story. I couldn't fathom making something for this poem that didn't look as though it could grow in a garden, and ribbons seemed a better approximation of vines to me than did beads (although I threw some beads in there for variety and flash). Copper is an earthier color, so I picked that for the chain instead of silver, which has a colder feel to me, or gold which doesn't usually appear in a garden. I initially planned to use a carved bone tooth as the pendant, but it just didn't quite work out.

How and when did you get started making jewelry?

June of 2007, actually. I just suddenly got the urge to make a necklace, and then to start designing them for The Orphan's Tales Art Show. I'm really not sure why beads or why that particular time, except to say that maybe I just needed another outlet for my art. I'd also gone through a fairly traumatic experience in May of last year that actually lead to my being diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, so perhaps putting my hands to work making something beautiful and tactile was a way of soothing that particular trauma. Interestingly, I find that I bead more when I am under stress.

Why did you chose this particular poem?

Well, "Inhumed" is about chilly winter graves and a dead girl, so I don't think I could've resisted. And the concept for "Rampion" was just too fabulous not to run with - also, I really do like the Rapunzel story. The relationship between Rapunzel and the witch is just rife for interpretation - whether you view it in a mother/daughter context as you've done in this poem, the context of two lovers as I've done in other work, or something that defies the trope of witch/princess.

There's been a small boom in fiction-related jewelry lately. Share your thoughts on it?

Hm. I think you've done a lot to contribute to that boom, first of all, as I think your Orphans' Tales tour sort of rounded up a lot of us who were doing this on our own, or over at the LJ bards_and_beads community, and exposed us not only to each others' work but to the work of craftspeople whose work we had not yet seen. I think the show also helped us get a bigger audience for what we do, so I think we owe a lot of thanks to you ;). More broadly, I think that the boom is just an offshoot of the interstitial arts movement. I mean, if media as diverse as theatre, sculpture, dance, fiction and poetry can be interstitial, then why not the wearable arts? I can't speak for others, but I know that I'm a particularly visual person, and the visual nature of the work of several speculative authors today (including you) probably helps us along.

Anything you'd like to plug?

Well, I'm about ready to have my summer jewelry sale, so please keep an eye on my LJ (upstart_crow) for that. I have a poetry book coming out next week from Sams Dot Publishing called The Handless Maiden and Other Twice-Told Tales. I'm also planning to design some jewelry around this release too. Also, check out my newest poetry collection, The Memory Palace from Norilana Books.