Julia Lowther

 

Bracelet

 

I was born in rural Virginia, in the United States, and moved with my family when I was 8 years old to the even more rural Quaker community of Monteverde in the cloud-forested mountains of Costa Rica. In this remote dairy community, we walked barefoot to school, hauled goods and people on horseback, and thought nothing of cooking dinner on a wood stove when the erratic electric power was out. There were pie socials, building bees, few cars, no TV, and all the Christmas gifts were hand-made. If things broke, you fixed them, if you needed something you didn’t have, you created it out of what you did have. For me, the legacies of this up bringing are a delight in the engineering puzzles of inventing and building, and a loving patience with the general processes of making things.

Since childhood, I’ve been embroidering, crocheting, knitting, sewing, painting, drawing, and sculpting, but only discovered metal work when I moved to Seattle in 1996 and began taking classes in jewelry and metal working through the Pratt Fine Arts Center, the Seattle Metals Guild, and North Seattle Community College. Those classes served as springboards for further self-education. Early in my experiments with metal I gravitated to chains. I find chains particularly appealing as the unruly stiffness of wire is transformed and tamed into the flexibility of highly portable and comfortably wearable ribbon-like structures with satisfying weights. The manual dexterity gained from decades of handwork and needlework with fibers served me well, and translated seamlessly to linking and knitting with wire.

Fast forward a decade, and I am still in Seattle, Washington, but now I am writing articles on chain making (Art Jewelry Magazine, March 2006, May 2006), and teaching numerous classes on the subject, including several at institutions where I once took classes myself. My work has been showcased in several books & magazines -- The Art & Craft of Making Jewelry by Joanna Gollberg, Chain Mail Jewelry by Terry Taylor & Dylon Whyte, and Art Jewelry Magazine, Sept. 2006, March 2007 – and I was the featured artist for May 2006 at Danaca Design Metalcrafting Center & Gallery.

My business, Flying Fox Jewelry, is named for the flying foxes (giant fruit bats) of Western Samoa, where I spent 2 years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and where flying foxes have been hunted almost to extinction. I hand-raised and released 2 orphaned flying foxes, and became a fan and champion of bats as a result. Generally misunderstood, bats, like art, are often considered expendable. Though we finally understand that bats sustain the forests through pollination and seed dispersal, we are still trying to get a similar grip on the value of art. The bats hidden in Flying Fox Jewelry are there to remind the wearers of the secret joys of self-adornment.