Beautiful and bold
Published Saturday October 31st, 2009
Jewelry designers Trudy Gallagher and Sandra Tremblay step back from their work at Bejewel to create a daring exhibition of work that challenges women to be brave - and to love themselves.
They are the "dog ate my homework" excuses of the jewelry world: uneven earlobes, a crooked nose, fat fingers. Designers Trudy Gallagher and Sandra Tremblay are exasperated at the litany of reasons women give as to why they can't pull off a dramatic necklace or a funky pair of dangly earrings.
The saddest part, Tremblay said, "is they are things that no one else sees."
Gallagher, the founder of Bejewel, a Fredericton jewelry studio and gallery, and Tremblay, who has worked for the company for five-and-a-half years, think these perceived flaws are actually about flawed perception, that the problem isn't with the women's bodies at all, but with body image.
The self-deprecation Gallagher has heard in the 20 years since founding Bejewel drives her mad.
"It makes me feel frustrated," she said. "If it's quiet, I'll say, 'Can we talk?' I'll say, 'From my perspective, we all have a neck and earlobes and a body. I don't mean to offend you, but I think what you're talking about is self-esteem.'"
Most people are terrified at the thought of drawing attention to themselves, the jewelry designers say.
"The most common thing people say to me over and over again is 'I love it, but where would I wear it?'" Gallagher said.
"Where wouldn't you wear it? There are no real fashion police. What's wrong with wearing a big necklace to your kid's soccer game?"
Gallagher's bold personal style reflects her statements. Monday, she sported funky black-and-silver-framed glasses, an angular bob streaked with blue, black leather shoes with architectural heels and a purple skirt and jacket made of a crinkly taffeta-like fabric.
"You only go around once," she said.
Rather than hector or lecture their clients, Gallagher and Tremblay channelled their reaction into Self-Perception/Self-Deception, co-designing the exhibition of 36 works that opened at the New Brunswick Crafts Council Fine Craft Gallery at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre on Oct. 8. It is on display until Nov. 20.
They intentionally held the show outside of the Bejewel boutique.
"We wanted to reach a different audience. We wanted to reach people who go to art shows and art galleries."
They also wanted to present things in a different way.
Instead of the glass display cases at Bejewel, the works in Self-Perception/Self-Deception are imaginatively arrayed on two-foot-tall papier mâché figures based on a squat wooden Burmese sculpture Gallagher had bought in an antique shop. A straight wooden stick for arms extends at 90 degrees to the rotund little body.
"It is pretty androgynous," Gallagher said.
Kent Jensen, a studio technician at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, where Gallagher has taught since 2001, made the figures, while Bejewel staffer Jeff Crawford, built the white stands. The forms are lit from within, illuminating little phrases subtly scripted onto the bodies. The negative ones - "My neck is too wrinkly,-My fingers are too fat,-My boobs are too big-" are lower than the positive messages, such as "I love myself today,-I feel beautiful" and, simply, "Thank you."
The little figures are laden with treasure. On some, earrings dangle where the eyes or nipples would be, or hang off the arms. Some of the larger necklaces are draped over the top of the figures' heads like jeweled cowls.
Bejewel's faithful will recognize some of the company's trademark design elements and materials in the show - multi-stand silver necklaces, collections of chunky gemstones, crystals - but they are exaggerated compared to what the company normally makes.
"For us, it was about being bigger and bolder and not worrying about who might wear it," Gallagher said.
Some of the wilder pieces include a dramatic sterling silver collar of freshwater pearls and peacock feathers, and a heavy, double-layered necklace of coral and quartz that has a tribal, ceremonial quality. There are cooler, more modern works, such as a series of sterling chains strung with great chunks of polished, milky-blue chalcedony that hangs almost to the belly button, or a necklace of coral and freshwater pearls set on smooth, slim curls of silver that coil down to below the ribs.
The works aren't just for display.
"It's all wearable. It's made to fit," Tremblay said. In some cases, they used a tailor's dummy to make sure the hang and lengths would work.
Not all of the works are so large.
Some are simple and small, including a few necklaces that use guitar strings as chains on which a series of big, gorgeous stones, including black lava rock, quartz, pyrite and coral, are strung.
"They are statement pieces," Tremblay said.
The show is a challenge to women to be bold, to consider donning something out of their usual comfort zone for a special occasion, if not everyday.
Gallagher's response to the many women who tell her they love her work but couldn't possibly pull it off echoes one of the ringing refrains from U.S. President Barack Obama's successful campaign.
"Yes, you can!" she exclaimed. "Yes, you can wear something big and ostentatious. You just have to try it, and that's the hardest part: to get people to try something."
The designers made the dare explicit at the exhibition's opening by inviting reception guests to try on a piece and pose for a photographer.
Black-and-white images of the impromptu models are now part of the show, hanging on the walls of the council's gallery.
The shots include one of Fredericton metal artist Brigitte Clavette.
The show, "it pushed Trudy's boundaries of what is jewelry," Clavette said. "I think she was trying to be a little looser, a little more intuitive in her approach ... she's extending her boundaries of perceived beauty and the wear-ability of the work."
Clavette said the activity at the opening of women - and a couple of men - donning the work and being photographed in it made the evening a sort of "performance piece."
Tremblay and Gallagher were no shrinking violets that night. They draped themselves in metre upon metre of silver chain from the Bejewel workshop. Throughout the evening, people kept asking if the chains were part of Bejewel's new collection, which exasperated Gallagher: Anyone can wrap themselves in chain, she said. "It was about making a statement."
While the proposal Gallagher submitted to the crafts council last year was for a solo show, she and Tremblay share credit for the exhibition.
"I had been sketching little ideas," Gallagher said. She showed them to Tremblay who, along with Gallagher and head jeweller Chris Rogers, makes up Bejewel's three-person design team. The two women began riffing on the sketches, playing off the other's ideas, adding a stone here, a chain there.
"Everything was totally flowing," Gallagher said.
The "solo" two-person show stirred up a bit of controversy.
A few weeks before the opening, Gallagher asked Clavette, head of the jewelry and metal arts studio at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in Fredericton, to proofread the poster for the show.
Clavette noticed the disparity and called Gallagher right up. "How can it be a solo show with two people?" she asked her friend and colleague.
Gallagher researched the history of artists and assistants and found that most employees of artists never got credit for their input.
"That didn't sit right with me," Gallagher said.
Gallagher and Tremblay put up a poster at the exhibition about their take on "solo," explaining that they have interpreted it in this case to refer to them as a unit separate and apart from Bejewel.
Besides Gallagher's affinity with Tremblay's design sensibility, and problems with her left eye that have affected her ability to design and build, "it was fun to work with another woman."
Although they have travelled together extensively for trade and trunk shows and share interests in fashion and music, they rarely have the chance to design away from the hectic demands of Bejewel.
For both women, designing and creating is a kind of compulsion.
"If you're a maker, you have that feeling inside of you," Gallagher said.
Gallagher was studying abnormal psychology in British Columbia, but itching to work with her hands, when someone asked her if she knew she could go to school to study jewelry design.
"I always thought that artists were people who drew pictures," she said.
That was the end of her psychology studies.
She moved to Quebec City for a program she hadn't been accepted into, and that was taught in French, which she was not fluent in.
Of course, she got in. And in six months her French had improved enough she could understand her classmates' jokes.
She vividly remembers a day early in the program, coming into class, opening her Thermos with a pop!, breathing in the aroma of hot coffee, and thinking, "so this is what people feel like when they find the thing they're meant to do."
Her original business plan was vague: move to New Brunswick and open a studio. That's what she did. Bejewel began as a one-woman operation in Gallagher's basement.
Twenty years later, she has a half-dozen employees, a retail gallery, and a busy wholesale business. Earlier this year, Bejewel joined the Atlantic Economuseum network, which promotes businesses that showcase artisans and craft trades.
The downtown gallery reflects Gallagher's sense of style and fun. It is hard to miss, even from the street, where lime-green trim on a bright blue background hints at the whimsical objects for sale inside.
Like Gallagher, the self-taught Tremblay always felt the need to make things. Before she was hired at Bejewel, she was working in the financial sector, getting up at 5 a.m. to make jewelry before going to work.
"I knew that she was a frustrated maker and that she had great potential," Gallagher said.
While they make it clear they don't feel creatively hobbled in their day-to-day work, Self-Perception/Self-Deception was a departure from the way they usually work at Bejewel. There, "you have to keep your audience in mind, and that's the public," Gallagher said.
The chance to design without a buyer in mind, "I found it to be really freeing," she said.
That said, Bejewel does present some opportunities to be a little wilder, a little freer.
"When we do a new collection, we always have a few pieces that people can aspire to," Tremblay said. And there is custom design work for individual clients, "but you really have to listen to how far they are going to let you go," Gallagher said.
The successful businesswoman, who has been nominated for and won numerous entrepreneurship awards, including Atlantic Business Magazine's Top 50 CEOs list of 2006, used to debate the relationship between creativity and commercialization with her friend Philip Iverson.
The late Fredericton painter once told her about a German painter who made one style of work that did well commercially, and another kind of painting that didn't sell much, but satisfied him creatively.
Gallagher thought this was the perfect balance.
Not Iverson, who told her he would rather work in a video store to support his family than make work with a market in mind, that he would give up art entirely if he wasn't free to paint what he wanted.
"As far as I'm concerned, you don't have to give that up," she said. "I don't think it's a compromise. I think it's reality. We understand we need to be well-rounded as business people and also as artists."
While the works in Self-Perception/Self-Deception are for sale, the exhibition had nothing to do with business, although the co-designers said they can imagine certain elements of the show influencing Bejewel's spring collection.
Gallagher suspects the show may inject a little more daring into their Bejewel designs.
"We're going to find it hard to go back into the box."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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