Image by Purnell Cropper
Karen Misher has been my metals and jewelry professor throughout my senior year of college. She’s one of the rare instructors I’ve met who break the stereotype of “If you can’t do it, teach it.” In addition to being an informed and talented jeweler, she’s a thoughtful and invested professor who seems to always anticipate student’s questions and provide them with valuable answers. Interviewing her for this project allowed me an interesting peak into her mind. The following are her answers on questions regarding her background, process, and aesthetic.
How did you get where you are? What type of education did you receive?
I got started in jewelry in a very roundabout way. My undergraduate degree was a double major in graphic design and printmaking and my undergraduate thesis was looking at yardage of fabrics. So I already had an interest in what it was to put things on the body but jewelry wasn’t really my focus.
When I got out of undergraduate school I was working in corporate design and I quickly became disenfranchised. I began to go back to my printmaking roots and wanted to work three dimensionally; I started casting paper but I still didn’t like the material, it was too transient to me. It was too close to things being thrown away, which was the issue I had with graphic design. And so I took a class in casting. One of the first things we cast was a small little figure in aluminum, and I think the moment I touched metal was a pivotal for me. There was something about the permanence and the hardness. Everything about it was really intense for me.
My first 2 to 3 years after that were still not really focused on the body. I was making small sculptures and functional work. And even my functional work was sometimes figurative. They were always sort of whimsical and they depicted objects, anthropomorphic objects. But they weren’t about the body. I was interested in vessels and containers, referencing the body. So I feel like I circled it and I was always kind of referencing the body somehow.
I went back to school through University of the Arts and my thesis there was looking at vessels and containers. After that experience I tried to figure out what it would mean to make a vessel on the hand and I started with a series of rings. That was the next big a-ha moment for me. I had finally gotten into what I was really talking about, which was: how do you have messages about personal expression having to do with personal story? There’s no better place for it than on the body.
So my education was also, I think, a round-about one. I did not have any of that experience in undergraduate school. I went to University of the Arts and got a second undergraduate degree in metals and jewelry. Then I took time and made and made for a long time, several years. After that I went back and got my master’s degree in sculpture, which really allowed me to then marry those two parts. When I was thinking about functional work it was very sculptural and when I was thinking of things on the body it was still sculptural, but I had never really visited what it meant to make sculpture. So I wanted to put myself into an education that was asking a different set of questions than what had been asked before. Because I didn’t need to be looking at a lot of technical things, I wanted to be looking at more of the conceptual side. So sculpture allowed me to move around in different ways and I made some very large work, which informed my very small work. I still came back to my small scale and I still came back to the body, just informed differently.
How many people do you think you know personally who actually started out in their medium and stuck with it? This is something I’m interested in as a student because I feel a lot of people I come across, even if they’re artists, start out in one medium and migrate to another.
I think it’s really common. Even if I just look outside of the idea of how many metalsmiths I know who started that way and I broaden that out and say “How many people do I know that are doing exactly what they started out doing in undergraduate school?” – so many have changed. And that’s not a bad thing. If I look at my work I can go back and see my printmaking sensibilities for sure. A lot of that still comes out in my work whether it’s etching or looking at text in interesting ways. Graphic design is still there because i’m still really interested in text in work. So it’s cumulative; you don’t have to choose one path.
I say this to students all the time: it takes 2 years to graduate. The first year feels like a freefall and it takes a while to sort of get your feet on the ground and figure out what you’re doing at all. But you take that information and you go wherever you’re going to be going. And none of it is useless, all of it sends you down another track.
What medium or mediums do you most often work in? Why?
In metals and jewelry I would say the two materials I gravitate towards the most are silver and then glass in terms of looking at lenses. So those two things come together for me in a really natural way. I like silver because of its color; I’ve never been fond of the other metal colors. I’ll use gold in very particular places if given the choice.
Lenses gave me the opportunity to think about not just what it means to be the wearer but what it means to be the audience and how you engage those two together. When women, or anybody, wears jewelry there’s this moment where you put it on and look at yourself in the mirror. And that’s often the last time you see for the day what your jewelry looks like. So this idea of having the gaze and capturing the gaze between two people that happens when you have a lens in place – whether that’s a lens that somebody’s looking through or it’s a lens that’s been mirrored so that suddenly the person who’s looking at you is looking back at themselves.
That doesn’t mean that it’s always there and there aren’t other materials I like to work with. I tend to be someone who’s very much a materialist; a cool material will drive me in some direction. So if you were to go in my studio it’s filled with all kinds of stuff that I’ll draw from physically to add to a piece or draw from conceptually because I like the object or material. But I would still say silver and glass are my two main materials.
“There’s an absence of color that I’m sensing…”
There is an absence of color, that’s absolutely true. There is an absence of me adding color. The color that comes in is because it’s the world being reflected in it. So sometimes what someone is wearing is being reflected, or the room they’re in is often being reflected.
Do you feel that finding your “voice” or confidence in your medium was a long process?
It was a long process for me. I think that there were those moments where I knew there was something that really clicked for me. And that’s exciting and scary. I always say when I have those moments I try to look at them with my peripheral vision because I don’t want to look at it so closely that I aim myself towards what I think I see. I still want the work to develop in a way that is a collaboration between the material and me. But it was a long process until I really found what my voice was.
Do you have any advice for someone doubting whether they’ll ever find it?
Absolutely. The first thing I would say is: I don’t know an artist today who wouldn’t say that they’ve had doubts at certain points, and probably not just once. Multiple times through your career, you have doubts. And you wonder whether you’re ever going to have the next best idea, or good idea, or great idea. You have to go through a lot of garbage to get there. That would be my biggest piece of advice. I know it feels trite to hear it and trite to say it, that there are no failures, because I know we feel them and they feel like failures and you can’t see them as anything but that until you get a little distance from them. But that is all the path; I have loads of really bad work at home. You can’t get from A to Z without traveling through the rest of the letters. And you really have to travel through it. Because all of that is informative, all of that is info that builds the next thing. And building your conceptual or aesthetic voice takes time because there’s so much information out there.
Along the way, did you have any ‘a-ha!’ moments?
I think that a-ha moments come in different sizes. So sometimes you really have a big one; that first big one of holding that piece of aluminum was a pivotal moment for me. And then you sometimes have other smaller a-ha moments in the making of a piece where suddenly something comes together. Or working on an exhibition where four or five pieces come together and you can see the story that you didn’t even know was there. They’re exciting when they happen and they can also be destabilizing.
Do you think there is any intrinsic value in a handmade good? Why?
Of course. The “Why?” really changes for each person as a maker, for each person who decides to buy things that are handmade, and even over time. For me the value of the handmade is not just the object, it is the process to get to the object that is so valuable. And for me, the maker, during that process so many things happen internally about why I’m making, how I’m making, what message I want to send. That process is the most important part. And then you get to a product and the product has a different life. So when I see work that is more mass produced, the story of the process feels lost in it. Because I believe that the object is holding all of that information, all of that process story and all of that hate and love and struggle in the object. Can you see it? I think sometimes you can absolutely. Other times I think it just holds a magic.
I also think that there are very few animals like us. Animals are also makers. You see amazing nests and amazing things that are made but we have taken it to a level that is astounding. So to see what can be done with the human brain and the human hand is incredible.
What do you think the relationship between the maker and buyer is? And also between the maker and audience in your case.
I think that there are different relationships going on. There’s the relationship between the maker and the object and that’s sort of the first relationship. Then the maker and the buyer is actually a really interesting one. So for me because my work thinks a lot about the audience, that’s the relationship that I think about sometimes even more than the wearer. I think about things in terms of how it will feel on the body, if it’s made for a particular type of person, if it’s telling a story about the wearer. But in my work it’s often about what the other person is seeing. So sometimes in my work the buyer is just a happy accident. And that person is then showing it to the audience.
Occasionally that’s not the case and I have a buyer that’s looking for something specific. But I think those are really challenging. So for that type of work that’s sort of more commissioned and very much about the wearer, my focus has to shift.
In the remainder in my work, the wearer is my necessity. I think I struggle a lot with how to exhibit my work and get the same feeling of the movement and what happens in a lens when it’s static; people aren’t static. But exhibition is. And so that’s always been a challenge for me. The wearer/buyer becomes something that’s a necessity.
Wear and Why 