Materials: nickel silver, nylon
Dimensions: 4" x 3" x.75"
This brooch, from the series Germinate, is fabricated of nickel silver with uniquely tatted red colored blooms.
Photo credit: Billie Jean Theide
Billie Jean Theide
Champaign, Illinois. USA
Billie Theide holds a MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington and a BFA from Drake University in Des Moines. She is the recipient of a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and five Artists Fellowship Grants from the Illinois Arts Council. Her creative work has been included in over four hundred fifty invitational, competitive, group, and one-person exhibitions. Billie Theide's work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco in California; Museum of Arts & Design in New York; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; Evansville Museum of Art in Indiana; Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Czech Republic; National Museum in Wroc?aw, Poland; Porcelain Museum in Riga, Latvia; Civic Art Gallery in Paneveys, Lithuania; Sonny and Gloria Kamm Collection in Los Angeles; and Sanford M. and Diane Besser Collection in Santa Fe. She is a Distinguished Member and Pa st-President of the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Billie Theide is Professor of Art in the School of Art + Design, the James Avery Endowed Chair in the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Chair of Studio Arts, and Chair of Crafts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I look beyond material in my studio practice. I am comfortable working with a variety of materials and I select those that are best suited to a well-defined, well-researched idea or concept. My creative work is derived from a passion for collecting, an interest in hybridization and diverse relationships, domesticity, craft, and the human propensity for excess and ornamentation.
The exhibition explores metal works whose primary theme is color embraced as their primary visual focus, whether that be using colored materials, exploring creating colored surfaces, or encasing the object in color.
As the world's largest jewelry related internet site, Ganoksin strives to develop exhibitions showcasing work from around the world. This exhibition was open to all metalsmiths, professional and amateur, advanced and beginner.
In total 303 artists contributed 814 show pieces for the permanent online exhibition.
The exhibition was curated by Beth Wicker, President of the North Carolina Society of Goldsmiths in the United States, and Adjunct Instructor at Northeastern Technical College in South Carolina. Director of the exhibition is Hanuman Aspler, founder of The Ganoksin Project, the world's largest internet jewelry site.
Hue is one of the primary properties of color, it refers to the place the color occupies on the visual spectrum. Humans have used hues throughout time, to create cave paintings, to decorate themselves, their clothing and their housing.
Different hues have taken on different meanings throughout time. Gold traditionally has been a color of purity - the metal gold is relatively unchangeable, and the hue of gold has come to stand for gods and goddesses, for royalty, for durability and for purity. Red has often meant love, or passion. Hues often reflect the meaning of the seasons, with pastels referring to spring and the burst of new life after the pale hues of winter. Summer is reflected in vibrant, deep hues, followed by the browning of hues in the fall as plants go to seed and die, and the land turns fallow.
The worth of a hue has often been tied to what is necessary to make the pigment that creates the hue, and the expensive involved in the process. Often created from crushed stones that had to be mined and carried by caravan over thousands of miles, or from fermented roots of plants only grown in certain areas, or the carapaces of rare insects - the creation of hue in a way that could be used by man was an involved and generally expensive process.
In today's world metalsmiths have access to perhaps the widest range of materials and hues in the history of man - and in some of the most affordable ways ever.
This exhibition celebrates hue - color - as an integral, inherent element of the work. We talk of the "richness" of color, and examples of this abound here. One expects hues from the colors of gemstones used in metalsmithing, but we also have hues from some less expected places. Glass enamels are an ancient way of adding color, as are a variety of patinas. Today's artists also use synthetic man-made materials to add color in ways that didn't exist a century ago.
We invite you to enjoy this celebration of hue, and the ways hues and their use have changed over time.
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