Touch Type
Metalsmith's handmade tools, jewelry and other artworks are a tactile experience
Published in the New Bedford Standard-Times on July 18, 2008
“Life is all about touch,” asserts metalsmith Sue Aygarn-Kowalski. The graceful curves and smooth surfaces of her functional hand tools entice you to pick them up, handle them, even use them. A treasured moment for her as an artist was when she saw a child reach out and instinctively pet one of the hammers she had on exhibit. That is how she wants her audience to respond to her work: with sensitive hands as well as appreciative eyes.
The same tactile quality extends to Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski’s
jewelry collection, which includes pod-like brooches bristling with tendrils,
and delicate wavy-edged earrings resembling petals. One look at her work,
crafted in metal and wood, and your fingers start tingling with an urge to
touch them. The
artist’s wish to engage our senses is tied to her heart-felt belief in the
value of direct and conscious contact with the world around us. “My work is an
argument for aesthetic experience over speed and efficiency,” she says, “for
skill over blind use, and for an absolute love of process.”
Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski grew
up on a sheep farm in Kemmerer, Wyoming. “Yellowstone National Park was in my
backyard,” she says, recalling hiking there with her parents when she was as
young as 2. Her mother
has always been a strong and loving influence, “the stuff fairy tales are made
of.” Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski describes her as tall, with soft gray curls tucked
under a floppy hat, wearing baggy overalls. “She made
work fun,” instilling in her daughter “the value of good work and doing
something well.”
As a child,
Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski felt a “constant desire to live physically and to push hard
physically.” Even strenuous chores on the family farm didn’t exhaust her
boundless energy; she ran laps around the playground at recess, and eventually
joined the track team in seventh grade. She took
art classes throughout high school, realizing her natural affinity for
three-dimensional expression when her teacher found her sculpting insects from
the paint during a painting assignment and suggested she switch to clay.
She entered
the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee on a track scholarship and started out
as a graphic design major. Then came a life-defining experience during her
junior year, when she signed up for a class in metalsmithing. The professor was
demonstrating with a blowtorch, and the assembled students watched as he held
the flame to a strip of metal and heated it into a soft, shiny puddle. Ms.
Aygarn-Kowalski was awestruck by the transformation. When the teacher asked for
a volunteer from among the group to practice the technique, she immediately
stepped forward to be the first to try her hand. Then and
there, she decided to changed her major to metals, fascinated by the material’s
qualities as “strong, durable, usable and infinitely shapeable.”
“There was
no way I could do anything else but this for the rest of my life,” she says. Her college program
included a year of study in Paris, where she met fellow traveler Ross Kowalski,
also a student from the University of Wisconsin, whom she would later
marry.
A foot
injury during her senior year curtailed Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski’s efforts on the
track team, and she “threw herself 100% into metalsmithing,” taking as many
classes as possible. Her undergraduate projects, while developing her technical
skills, began to define her direction as an artist. Inspired by natural forms,
these initial pieces explored “systems replicating systems,” such as the design
similarities between maple-tree seeds and dragonfly wings.
She worked
as a goldsmith in Milwaukee upon graduation, later relocating to the Southcoast
of Massachusetts when Mr. Kowalski was offered a teaching position in this
area. Then,
during a trip to Italy, Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski chanced upon a museum exhibit of 18th-century
tools. Entranced by the objects’ physical beauty and historical significance,
“that’s when I found my voice.” Back home she began crafting her own complex
instruments, including a compass and a metronome.
After a
year of work on this series, Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski decided that she wanted and
needed the “community and intensity” offered by graduate study. She enrolled in
the master’s degree program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, with
Susan Hamlett as her advisor. Ms. Hamlett
encouraged her to create work that “wasn’t confrontational,” but instead would
“argue for the good, for what I revere.” She taught Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski that
artwork is “only right when it comes to you naturally.” Her master’s thesis
exhibition – held in 2003 and featuring a group of levels, hammers, even a
self-portrait as a center punch clothed in studded leather – was a celebration
of her love for tactile expression and precise craftsmanship.
Her work
today in her New Bedford studio encompasses a number of simultaneous projects
in various stages of completion. She begins each new piece with a firm idea
about the look of the finished product – “I can picture it in my mind” – but
she leaves a clear “20% open to intuition” or the possibility of the need for
changes or adaptations that might present themselves during creation. The
multiple techniques she uses to transform raw metal and wood are varied and
complex.
To watch
Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski at work is to see magic happen before your eyes. Her hands
take on each distinct task with focus, precision, instinct and experience. Each
step in the process – from wielding a blowtorch, to roll-printing a pattern, to
cutting with a handsaw, to forming on a lathe, to shaping with a hammer, to
sanding and oiling – all require a different type of touch, ranging from
strength to dexterity to tenderness. Every
segment of the object must fit together perfectly; being off by even a fraction
of an inch means they won’t join properly. It is a meticulous process, and one
that still thrills Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski today as much as it did when she was
first learning as an undergraduate.
Her ongoing
jewelry projects include the Breaking and Mending Series, tiny floral shapes
joined in grid-like clusters and held with several pins, so they can be
fastened to a garment in whatever unique configuration pleases the wearer. She
is also currently adding to a series of chokers and bracelets in round
pillow-like forms, each one cushioning a minute silver ball in its center. And
she recently fashioned “Stella,” a curvaceous hammer decked out in a ruffled
silver gown. In addition
to her studio work, Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski serves as exhibit preparator at the
Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, where she also teaches workshops in jewelry
and metalsmithing.
In a recent career honor,
her “Goblet” was purchased by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City,
where it will be on permanent display when the museum’s new Columbus Circle
location opens this fall. Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski’s work
is represented by Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge and Kusmin Art Gallery in
Plymouth.
A devoted animal lover,
always accompanied at the studio by her chocolate Labrador Retriever named
Winston, Ms. Aygarn-Kowalski recently started a project to help animals in
need. When she saw a news story on the increase in abandoned pets due to home
foreclosures, she decided to create and market a line of sterling-silver
key-chains, necklaces and zipper-pulls decorated with dog and cat emblems.
These hand-crafted items are available for $25 each, with 100% of the proceeds
going to benefit local animal shelters. For more information, please contact
the artist at 508-397-3978.
In today’s culture of
manufactured plastic utensils and computer-generated imagery, Ms.
Aygarn-Kowalski wants to awaken and challenge our eyes and our fingertips.
Through the inventive detail and sensuous texture in her tools and jewels, she
encourages us to “live physically in an increasingly digital world.”
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