Recycled Jewelry

Recycled jewelry is fun. It’s really just fun! A couple of years ago I had a show at a gallery in New York, and it was all recycled jewelry, using recycled materials. I went right over where I live here in Asheville, North Carolina to a place called Biltmore Scrap & Metal. You buy scrap metal by the pound. I made handmade chains from old copper wire from the electric company. There was a box of door hinge pins and door stops there and we reground them. We tooled them on the grinder and made them into beautiful, huge, recycled jewelry pendants that were very medieval. They were 100% recycled materials. You can also do something called “etching the metal” using Ferric Chloride, which is a salt. By using a resist, even in these sheets of copper that we found, we acid-etched patterns. With that, the whole show was recycled materials. Recycled jewelry really is fun. You aren’t starting with a blank slate saying, “hmm what am I going to make?” You’re starting with a bunch of stuff and saying, “what can I do with this to make it into wearable, beautiful, recycled jewelry?”