www.skyglass.com

Email: gayle@skyglass.com

This series is titled:

‘Rain Jewelry: For All Rains, When They Come’

Rain is rare and precious here in the desert, so I pay close attention when it arrives. I like to sit on the porch and watch the tall poplars by the road whip in the wind, while I get wet and chilly from blown rain, and carefully absorb the smell of the rainy red clay. When something is this valuable, as valuable as rain, surely you ought to have special ornaments and objects of ritual to greet it?

Skyglass Wearable Art

Artists Statement:

 

I favor copper as a material—I love the color and flexibility. Also copper is the state metal of Utah, where I live and work, and a lot of my pieces are about what I see every day in Utah, the apple orchard, the desert with red rocks, the wide sky, the shallow rippling lake.

 

‘Apple Orchard on April 22nd 2003 Santaquin, Utah’  Number One of the Orchard Series 2003

Gayle Broadbent-Ferris

Sterling silver, rose quartz, amazonite, lapis nevada, tiger’s eye.

I’m very pleased with this one, because the lapis Nevada captures exactly the colors of apple blossom buds almost ready to open. The cube of amazonite likewise is the precise mild milky blue of the spring sky. There’s only one tigers’ eye bead—it’s a bee, and there are few out  this early in spring. The rose quartz teardrop is a petal, of course, and two more for the ears.

 

‘West Apple Orchard on April 22, 2003’

 

‘Rain Falling Over West Mountain’

Necklace: Heat treated copper, labradorite, grass fiber                            Gayle Broadbent-Ferris

It’s the prettiest thing in the world, to see sheets of rain blowing in the wind, far off over West Mountain, which is a dry mountain, and needs the rain badly.  How lovely, you think, watching, imagining the dry clay receiving the falling water gratefully.

The poplars bend and dance in the strong wind.

 

 

‘On the Porch in the Rain’

Gayle Broadbent-Ferris

Necklace: Copper, labradorite, moonstone, jasper, freshwater pearls

I told you how I love to sit on the porch and watch the rain. The jasper is the color of the wet logs, the red clay, the labradorite the hue of raindrops rapidly falling, the copper spirals the moving wind.

I was going to represent my dog, all cozy at my feet, with a big fat golden tube of amber, but decided against including him in this representation. Because he’s been out in the rain, and let’s face it, even good dogs are stinky when they’re wet.

 

‘Rain Falling on the Canal in Summer’ Gayle Broadbent-Ferris

Necklace: Sterling silver, labradorite, freshwater pearls.

What a murky, tamed canal this is. No fish or lily pads are here, just cloudy  dark water slipping onward to Utah Lake. But now the rain blows over to us both as I walk by it.

What a lot of raindrops fall! How the canal leaps to receive them!

I could not manage to leave, even though my hair was whipped into a soggy mass all over my face. This rain on the canal water made tremendous patterns. I believed if I watched long enough I would learn something of great significance and value.

I know I would have, but I got too cold and had to run home and go inside before I learned it.

It was a mystery lost.

Wearing Stories

 

 In these pieces I seek to capture a moment. To tell a story, to contain an experience.

 

 

 

 

None of these pieces are for sale, because I need them for an upcoming exhibit. I just wanted to show my favorite ones to you because I’m so pleased with them.

 ©2003 Skyglass Studios

‘Yellow Roses Blooming at Old Homesite’

Gayle Broadbent-Ferris 

Copper, amber, yellow jade, aventurine chips. The spirals are the wind, soughing through the rye grass.

All over small towns in Utah you find them, yellow roses on long tough canes. I’ve heard that the Mormon pioneers carried them across the plains to plant them carefully at their journeys end.

Often they are the last indication that a house once stood here. The yellow roses stand, wild now under a high blue sky, blooming near cracked foundations and rye grass.

 

Yellow roses at abandoned house near Manti, UT 2002