Dana Driver - Mendocino Art Center

Dana Driver
rock art and bottlecaps:
jewelry from found objects
by Peggy Templer
Photo by Larry R. Wagner
If you tossed a beachcomber/scavenger/naturalist,
the inventor of the Rubik’s cube, one of the elves from
Santa’s toyshop, and a slightly mad scientist into a very
large blender and extracted the DNA, you’d get Dana
Driver. Technically, however, she’s a metalsmith and
jeweler whose imaginative and intricate work is not only
beautiful, but makes you smile. Only Dana would put
wheels on rocks, flatten bottle caps into brooches, and use
her sense of humor as a main design impetus.
I interviewed Dana at her studio in Albion, which is
part jewelry studio and part natural history museum. In
boxes, drawers and shelves are the found objects Dana
has picked up, intrigued by their design, structure, color,
texture, and the possibilities for incorporating them into
her work. This includes rocks, shells, dried mushrooms,
Flower Pendant/Brooch - Reused bottle caps, corrugated, embossed, patinas,
sterling.
6
bones, small animal skeletons, insects, pods, and twigs.
You know right away you are not in a typical jeweler’s
studio.
Dana is a native Californian, born in Visalia, but
raised in Puerto Rico, Panama, and points in between.
She credits her mother, an artist herself, with her lifelong
passion for art. Her real interest in art began during the
family’s idyllic sojourn in Panama, where she became an
inveterate collector of found objects, such as rocks and
shells, and recycled materials. Dana says, “My interest in
jewelry started at age 10, when I made jewelry from fishing swivels, brass fittings, and anything else that intrigued
me . . .” At the age of 14, having already designed jewelry
for four years, Dana came home and announced to her
mother that she wanted to learn to solder – an unusual,
and dangerous, activity for a young teen. Her mother
found her a private tutor to teach her soldering and jewelry fabrication. Her very early influences were Lalique,
Tiffany, and Fabergé. Even as a child, she says, she knew
the difference between technique and artistry, and also
had an early intuitive sense of the need to be “in tune”
with her raw materials.
After high school, Dana attended the California
College of Arts and Crafts, where she “received a great
background in all artistic media.” She earned a BA in
Metal Arts from CCAC, then was off to Jerome, Arizona,
then a burgeoning artists’ colony. She became involved
with a group of artists who eked out a living with a cooperative store. At that time, she was making contemporary
southwestern jewelry, using jasper instead of the more
traditional turquoise and coral, and teaching herself gold
work. She realized that she had no affinity for the traditional gold and diamond jewelry industry, and continued
to pursue her own iconoclastic designs.
After the Jerome business venture, Dana moved to
the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean, and opened a
store there. She quit doing any soldering and focused
instead on cold connected work only. She made rings
and bracelets of stone and metal,
“not that distinctive from other jewelers, but very contemporary with
an unusual ‘ancient’ look to them.”
While living on St. Croix, Dana
became particularly fascinated with
beach stones, basalt, shells and other
‘detritus,’ and began “trying this and
that and my style began to evolve. I
also became very distressed thinking about the environmental cost of
mining precious stones and metals,
and began using found objects and
beachstones in my work.” She walked
the beaches, searching for and picking
up “anomalies” – shells and rocks and
tiny fish and bird bones – and then
realized the work she wanted to do.
According to Dana, this realization
came as an urgent epiphany; she felt
there was no time to lose to begin
doing this work, which was to make
art from natural materials, acquired
by foraging, and to move completely
away from traditional materials. She
also at that time felt a need to be a
part of a larger community of artists, and moved to the Mendocino
Coast, where her parents, Dan and
Katherine Driver, had retired to the
town of Albion. Dana then began
the stunning work for which she is
best known, in which she finds, polishes, carves and drills beach stones
from the Albion shore, and inlays
those with soft metals (gold and
silver) hammered into the carved
designs and fashioned into rings,
brooches, pendants, and small sculptural pieces. She also began teaching
an extremely popular class, “Primal
Tech Rock Art,” at the Mendocino
Art Center.
The process of figuring out how
to carve and inlay stone took many
months to “puzzle out,” which is one
Articulated Beetle – brooch-beach stone carved and
inlaid with fine silver, sterling.
Die Pendant – Bottle caps, copper, sterling, 14 kt.,
patinas, fabricated, hinged together and opens to
reveal the message “The Die Has Not Been Cast”
Flamingo Brooch – beach stone carved and inlaid
with fine silver, sterling, 18 kt., Iolite
reason it was so intriguing to Dana.
She is always most inspired when
confronted with a challenge – how
can she make this work? How can
she solve the problems inherent in
the designs she is creating? This process of working to resolve a puzzle
is what keeps Dana energized and
keeps her always trying to do something she has not done before.
Which is how she arrived at
her next challenge, bottlecap jewelry. Dana wanted to “recycle some
material that’s abundantly around,”
and from her long habits of foraging and staring at the ground,
she realized that “creating jewelry
from found bottle caps, tin cans, and
rusty bits of metal would lessen my
carbon footprint.” Her bottlecap
jewelry is utterly unique – beautiful
and fun.
Dana foresees that her next
passion will be automata, which
refers to mechanical toys or “small
sculptures that do stuff.” She loves
the puzzle aspects of simple, basic
mechanical movement, and has
already experimented with her rock
beetles with articulated legs and
wheels.
Dana credits Alexander
Calder, whose work she first became
acquainted with while attending
CCAC, with being her “hero” and a
major influence on her own work.
The reason for that is that “everything he did, it looked like he had a
pretty darned good time doing it.”
And that is every bit as important to
Dana Driver as it was to Alexander
Calder.
Dana’s work can be seen at
North Coast Artists, Mendocino
Jewelry Studio, and on her Web site at
www.danarocks.com
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SHA SHA HIGBY
International Performance/Sculptural Artist to Perform
at the Matheson Performing Arts Center
International performance/sculptural artist Sha Sha Higby is known for her
evocative and haunting performances using
the exquisite and ephemeral body sculpture
she meticulously creates herself and moves
within. Elaborate sculptural costume, dance,
and puppetry explore magic and emotion,
creating an atmospheric world within the
borders between death and life. Ms. Higby
has performed her unique body of work
throughout the United States, and internationally in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Slovak,
Bulgaria, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland,
England, Belgium, Germany and Holland.
She is the recipient of numerous grants and
awards. She studied for one year in Japan
in 1971, observing the art of Noh Mask
and theater and then received a FulbrightHayes Scholarship to study dance and shadow puppet making and performance arts in
Indonesia for five years at the Academy of
Music, Central Java, Indonesia. In addition to traveling throughout Southeast Asia Photo by Albert Hollander from Folds of Tea
to Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), she
received an Indo-American Fellowship to study the textile arts of India, and a Travel Grants Fund from Arts
International to study in Bhutan. She has also recently studied lacquer arts in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan through
the auspices of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. *
8
by Peggy Templer
Sha Sha Higby could easily be the poster child for
the single-child family. An only child until the age of
eleven, this amazingly imaginative artist can trace her
creative development back to the hours she spent alone
in her upstairs bedroom as a child. She was constantly
drawing, making up stories, creating dolls and puppets, imagining and producing entire travelogues with
forests and trails and other destinations, all within the
confines of her room. Her mother always encouraged her to indulge her imagination, and had endless
patience for a creatively messy room. Her stepfather
taught her to sew and was handy with tools, so that she
began making things for their home and friends, dolls
with long skinny legs, 100 mice finger puppets, eggs
with scenes inside, stories embellished with costume
and fabric. She also wrote stories and bound the books.
Her mother opened a retail clothing store, but Sha Sha
still made all of her own clothes.
Sha Sha majored in art at Skidmore College, from
which, during her junior year, she participated in an
exchange program to Japan and wound up staying
for one year instead of three weeks. In Japan she was
introduced to many of the elements that would become
features of her own life’s work – Kabuki theater, Noh
mask carving, dance and movement, tea ceremony, calligraphy, elaborate Shinto and Buddhist rituals and rich
costuming. According to Sha Sha, “Japanese crafts and
Noh Theater, with its elaborate costuming and poetic
structure, were the major influence on my work.”
After returning from Japan, “on her own” as an artist, Sha Sha began making installation pieces for galleries,
primarily small objects that were a cross between sculpture and puppetry strung on threads which “involved a
lot of sewing,” as well as the use of carved wood which
she learned from Noh Mask Carving. It was during this
time that she became particularly intrigued with Butoh
Dance performances. “The dancers’ bodies were like
Above: Photo by Albert Hollander from Folds of Gold by Sha Sha Higby. Japanese urushi lacquer, gold leaf, embroidery, silver filigree leaves
9
sculptures and I was
inspired by them to finally pull all of these elements
The Song (“Naki Goe”) 12’ by
4.5’ by 4’, mixed media including together – dancing, moveJapanese urushi
ment, sculpture, puppetry,
costuming and non-linear or
non-verbal story telling.” Her first performance, in which
she essentially mounted her elaborate sculpture on her
back, took place in a private home. Sha Sha recalls this
first performance as “the most exciting thing I had ever
done. Everything all came together.” From then on, she
did a performance a year, but as the costumes/puppets
became more elaborate, the interval between performances became longer. Now it takes her up to two years to
prepare the puppets and props for a performance. Over
time the performances have become richer, incorporating
more and more different mediums, including Japanese
urushi lacquer, lighting and sound.
Many times after performances, Sha Sha was asked
to do workshops to teach students how to create the
masks and costumes she uses in her unusual visual and
performing art form. She has been a teacher throughout
a few decades of touring, and has taught several times at
the Mendocino Art Center. On October 23rd, she will be
teaching a workshop, “Golden Archetype on a Stick” at
the Mendocino Art Center, in which students will learn to
cast, mold and recast theatrical masks, and mount them
on sticks and add wires and ornamentation to make a
spirit catcher.
Sha Sha describes her performances as “like a poem
or a painting with movement,” in which the meaning of
the story is experienced in subtle, non-linear ways. The
performances are choreographed to specific points on her
10 journey but also spontaneous, like
a drawing, as she dances along her
way. They follow a progression from
beginning to end, but the journey is mysterious and unscripted.
The audience is an important
part of Sha Sha’s performances. The
audience comes along on the artist’s journey as, child-like, she
plays with the toys and objects
she comes across, building to a “crescendo of meaning and discovery,” which is subjective for
each member of the audience. She attempts throughout
the performance to draw her audience in by approaching
them and by providing them with noisemakers, some of
which (bird calls, rattles, etc.) have been made to enhance
the story line, as the audience deems appropriate. After
the performance, the audience is invited on stage to view
the costumes, masks and props.
Sha Sha’s performances are evocative of a child on
a magical journey, discovering things for the first time,
moving from experience to experience, dancing and
exploring through the mysteries of life, as every child can,
just like the child Sha Sha did alone in her upstairs room,
way back in the beginning.
Sha Sha’s work has been featured on the cover of
Ornament Magazine as well as Crafts Arts International
Magazine and Surface Design Magazine.
This acclaimed artist will be performing at the Matheson
Performing Arts Center on Sunday, October 24th, at 7 pm.
Tickets are available in advance for $16 ($22 at the door).
Phone the Mendocino Art Center at 707-937-5818 to order
tickets.
Sha Sha will also be teaching a workshop entitled “Golden
Archetype on a Stick” on Saturday, October 23rd, the day
before her performance, where you can create masks to use
to participate in the performance. Contact Sha Sha Higby at
415 868-2409 for details regarding the workshop.
For more information about Sha Sha Higby and to view a
movie of one of her performances, visit her Web site at www.
shashahigby.com
*reprinted from www.shashahigby.com
Book Review
Maguey Journey
by Kathryn Rousso
reviewed by Barbara Shapiro
Basket maker and former Mendocino resident
Kathryn Rousso has devoted much of the past ten
years to research about the maguey plant found from
the southern United States to northern South America.
This life sustaining plant provides food and beverage, clothing, shelter and, most prominently, thread
for a wide variety of utilitarian objects. Fulbright
Award winner Rousso’s research culminates in Maguey
Journey: Discovering Textiles in Guatemala. Predating
cotton, maguey production’s long history is tied to a
continued subsistence lifestyle. Textile enthusiasts will
love this book as will ethno-botanists, anthropologists,
and travelers to Latin America. Rousso shares her passion for the quieter Guatemalan maguey textiles often
overlooked by comparison to colorful backstrap woven
cotton trajes. Her approach is culturally sensitive with
attention to detail born from years
of experience as a textile artist.
In Part One, “The Land of
Maguey,” we meet the men and
women who for centuries have
worked this strong and versatile
fiber with varying techniques in
Guatemala’s distinct geographic
regions. We revel in a travelogue
of Rousso’s sometimes harrowing
research trips across Guatemala
since the 1980’s. We meet the generous maguey workers she encountered whose practices vary by community. Part Two, “The Plant to
Textile Transformation,” clarifies
the biology, growth, fiber extraction, dyeing, spinning and textile
production of maguey in a seemingly endless variety of structures.
Techniques examined include
looping, knitting, ply split darning,
linking, interlacing, braiding, and weaving. There are
diagrams and references for further study as well as
beautiful photos. Rousso explains common equipment
including several loom types and the many products
fashioned from maguey including ropes, cargo nets,
bags, tumplines, horse and mule gear, hammocks, and
even fireworks. Part Three, “The Gift of Life,” explores
the economics of this most persistent Guatemalan cottage industry. In spite of dramatic changes in demographics since post civil war stability encouraged greater international trade and the incursion of plastic into
traditional life, Rousso is enthusiastic about a future for
maguey as a sustainable green product. Maguey Journey
is a fascinating read about the staying power of this
durable fiber and the people who have mastered it.
Maguey Journey: Discovering Textiles in Guatemala,
University of Arizona Press,
2010, is available at Amazon.
com and through the publisher.
Kathy Rousso is the former
coordinator of the Fiber Arts
Department at the Mendocino
Art Center. She currently
resides in Ketchikan, Alaska.
Barbara Shapiro is a textile artist and educator from the Bay
Area. Her weavings and baskets are profoundly influenced
by traditional and historic textile traditions. She is a board
member of the Textile Society
of America and recently taught
an indigo dyeing workshop at
the Mendocino Art Center.
www.barbara-shapiro.com
11
Shozo Sato:
Living Treasure
In a magical tea garden at the end of a tree tunnel
in Inglenook, there lives a Japanese wizard. He is a private, gentle, courtly man, who nevertheless radiates a
powerful force. He uses that force to transform people
into artists.
Shozo Sato describes Kamakura, where he grew
up, as “a city of 100,000 people and 300 Zen temples:
Kabuki actors, Nobel prize winners... a highly motivated culture.” Shozo’s father was a doctor, his mother
an ardent theater-goer. Shozo was born in 1933, the
year Japan left the League of Nations and began beating war drums. “When I was four, my father returned
from a house call to find me dancing in a kimono of
my mother’s. I started my study of traditional Japanese
dance when I was six. Like other boys, I was always
being asked what I wanted to become. Boys my age
were expected to answer ‘pilot’ or ‘commander’ or
‘soldier’ but I always said, ‘artist’. I was a problem kid,
sneaking out of academic classes into other people’s
art classes.
“It was a blessing: from childhood, I always knew
what I wanted to do.” Japanese who lived through the
Occupation remember it as a harsh time, but Shozo
stayed in his own room, practicing dance, painting,
making drama. He attended a fine arts high school
and college, taking a degree in oil painting. “My classmates always talked of going to Paris and New York to
become famous artists, but they didn’t know Japanese
art. I think, if you want to stand on the world stage,
you must know your own native art, and the philosophy behind it, because eventually that will come out.
“When I was 19, I began to wonder how to earn a
living. My childhood mentor, a painting master, prohibited selling paintings, because this ‘success’ locks an
artist into the style of the sold painting, and creativity
12 Photos by Larry R. Wagner
by Michael Potts
is lost. This becomes a form of prostituting the soul. As
an artist, you must not think of yourself as a merchant.
So I offered my services to an orphanage for free. Every
Saturday I taught art to orphans. In those days, the
orphanages were filled with children of mixed races:
Black, Brown, White, who were left in little baskets at
the orphanage door. Every child has a different way of
drawing, and to me their different ethnic backgrounds
were obvious. Soon I was teaching art in the U.S. Naval
Independent School. My talent for seeing ethnicity in
paintings helped me understand that we all have different gifts. By encouraging these differences, we can
help children find their creativity.”
A resurgence in Japanese reverence for culture
in the post-war years offered abundant opportunities
for Shozo to learn new artistic disciplines. He studied
Kabuki with one of the Living National Treasures,
Nakamura, Kanzaburo XVII, who honored Shozo
with the title Nakamura, Kanzo IV. During this time
he also studied Ikebana (the art of arranging flowers)
and the Tea Ceremony. He opened a small private art
academy where he taught Sumi-E (black ink painting), Ikebana, the Tea Ceremony, and Kabuki Dance.
Shozo recounts, “One day, a tall American lady, a
Fulbright scholar from the University of Illinois, came
to visit my academy. She wanted to learn why so many
Japanese artists practice many disciplines. I told her,
Simple: Japanese arts are all inter-related. Because
Japan has few raw materials, the only way to survive
on the international scene is to produce people with
talent. After two weeks of attending classes, she asked
me if I would come to Illinois if I was invited.”
Shozo took the invitation to be a calling. From the
mid-1960s, Professor Sato taught at the University of
Illinois, ChampaignUrbana. He was
often invited to
other cities, universities, and museums to give lecturedemonstrations,
becoming a roving
ambassador for the
Japanese arts. At
the University of
Illinois, his Kabuki
Theater productions
were enthusiastically
received, transforming the way many
midwesterners perceived their world. Appreciated for
his unusual style and teaching gift, Shozo was granted
permanent residency by an Act of Congress (90-S-2422
sponsored by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin). “Starting a Kabuki group in Japan is easy: you just
go to the costumer and the wigmaker. In the midst of
a cornfield in Illinois, you get books, learn how to sew
costumes, find suitable materials, make wigs. Striving
for authenticity, I learned a lot. I accepted my calling
– maybe, more a matter of Karma? – to come to the
United States and, being different, make use of those
differences with my students, to try to open their
eyes and hearts a little bit. In Japan and the U.S., this
was a time of grassroots peace activity,
and activists welcomed intercultural
exchanges. We cannot leave peace up
to governments,
because industry
pressures governments into wars ‘to
make a buck.’”
In
1967,
Shozo was invited
to Mendocino by
Bill Zacha, whose
interest in Japanese
13
art has enriched the Art Center. “I thought, ‘ocean,
culture, just like Kamakura.’ I didn’t know it was a cold
water place, and so on my first Sunday I put on my
swimsuit and went to the beach. People were saying,
‘look at that crazy guy.’ Ah! The Art Center, the ocean
through the Cypress trees behind it: like Kamakura!”
As his eminence grew, Professor’s Sato’s skill as a
teacher increasingly called him away from Japan House,
his Illinois venue, and all the travel on icy midwestern
roads led him to look for a milder climate. Mendocino
called, and by 1990 he and his wife, Alice, chose to build
his Center for the Japanese Arts in Northern California,
north of Fort Bragg.
“There is an art to knowing a student’s needs,
presenting new ideas in a way that can be understood.
University students take courses because school requires
them to study different cultures. Older students, coming
of their own will, are seeking something: Fun? Meaning?
Philosophical background? Every one: different. My lefthanded Zen monk copies Sutras, learning every stroke
backwards. It is impossible. In Japan, everyone learns to
write with their right hands because Japanese is a righthanded system. I challenge each student with something
exotic, entertaining, so, before they know, they are seriously studying. First, catch their interest, then gradually,
like training a wild horse, sprinkle sugar cubes, carrots,
whatever the horse likes...”
Zacha’s interest in Japan kept the Art Center gazing
westward, resulting in Mendocino’s sister city relationship with the town of Miasa. “I am pleased that the
Miasa program carries on,” Shozo says. “The Art Center
can present events that open hearts to Asian sensibilities.
14 Once our hearts open, we will maintain our quest for
mastery of the art of life. It is an honor for me to have an
opportunity to present this Japanese attitude to people
who honestly wish to learn.
“You see,” he continues, “Japan honors culture. For
example, during a political campaign, people bring a nice
piece of paper to a candidate and ask him to do some
calligraphy. If they like what he paints, they vote for him.
Calligraphy is a very revealing art and can show the quality of a person. In other disciplines, materials change,
subjects differ, but the center of the self stays the same.”
To share his art more widely, Shozo has produced
four gorgeous books, two authoritative works for adults,
Sumi-E: The Art Of Japanese Ink Painting and Ikebana:
The Art Of Arranging Flowers, and two for children,
Tea Ceremony and Ikebana: Asian Arts And Crafts For
Creative Kids, all published by Tuttle.
As befits a wizard, Professor Sato circulates, ageless,
graceful, and wise, among his students in the workroom
of his Inglenook academy, guiding a hesitant hand, whispering encouragement. A local physician looks up from
a finished character. “This is harder than heart surgery,”
he confesses. The wizard smiles.
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