Formations – Paving the way for 2025

I love sculpture. During our Cape Ann Artisans sabbatical year, I had the opportunity to experiment with sculpture thanks to my participation in the Cape Ann Museum’s Cape Ann Blossoms event. Many of the artisans took advantage of this unique opportunity to go outside our design comfort zones and/or genres to meet the requirements of this special invitation. The pieces I made for this show included two stepping stones, one of which included antique sea glass bottlenecks and could be used to hold the flowers designed by fellow artisan Deb Gonet. I am now continuing to make these unique garden sculptures as long as I have enough bottlenecks to do so. I love that this will be a limited collection.
Sculptural elements have been part of my wearable art since I started creating. Over the past year, I have leaned into working with highly unusual sea glass formations – pieces that are so interestingly molded by the environment, it’s almost hard to see what they were before. Then, working with these pieces on their own or in conjunction with other oddly shaped pieces, something truly wonderful emerges! This focus on using the most unusual pieces in my collection applies to both wearable art and my new found direction of garden stepping stones and sculptures.

In the coming year, I plan to identify the most unusual pieces in my collection and call the resulting wearable art “Formations.” If they are too big or heavy to use in jewelry, I will use them in garden stepping stones or sculptural pieces. Now my sea glass treasure hunt begins anew! This gives me an incentive for digging back into my forgotten pieces to see which ones have been neglected in previous design intervals.

Some of the pieces that have already evolved out of this new direction include:

• GreenWaves – pendant
• Ice Flower – pendant
• Eternity bracelet
• Waves – bracelet

Formations also makes me think of other concepts. Formations of new ideas. Formations of opinions. Formations of a point of view. Evolution into a place that has been formed over time. Re-formation. Formulas. Forming new relationships. All of these forms of formations are what I will look forward to in 2025 during the upcoming Cape Ann Artisan Tour!