{"id":1957,"date":"2015-11-04T16:54:34","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T16:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/metalwerx\/?p=1957"},"modified":"2015-11-04T16:57:25","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T16:57:25","slug":"kat-cole-finding-inspiration-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/metalwerx\/2015\/11\/04\/kat-cole-finding-inspiration-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Kat Cole: Finding Inspiration Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Joan Dusoe<\/p>\n

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No matter where she goes, jewelry artist and sculptor Kat Cole finds something that influences her work, and then she finds a way of sharing that inspiration with others. Cole is visually inspired by the forms and colors in the landscapes she sees, and she is propelled deeper into her work by the experiences and interactions that she has with the people she encounters in her many roles in the world of contemporary jewelry and craft. Teaching workshops, organizing pop-up galleries for the online store she co-founded, Jewelry Edition<\/em>, and now a board member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG,) this young artist gets, and gives something everywhere she goes.<\/p>\n

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Oil and Water<\/em> <\/strong>(left) by Kat Cole:\u00a0enamel, steel;\u00a0Sense of Color<\/em><\/strong> (right)\u00a0by Kat Cole:\u00a0enamel, steel<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Kat recently taught a sold-out workshop here at Metalwerx, entitled Enameling on Steel, <\/em>that not only instructed students how to employ this technique, but also how to score and fold metal to create geometric forms. Cole\u2019s work is largely inspired by architectural structures. Tantalized by the landscape, built and altered by human history, Cole sees the distinct and unique qualities of each community, while at the same time recognizing the common forms that we have created around us.<\/p>\n

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The View <\/strong><\/em>by Kat Cole; steel, enamel, plexiglass<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Smack dab in the middle of her adolescence, Kat and her family moved from the suburbs of Atlanta, GA; a diverse community with an equally diverse landscape of rolling hills, trees and streams, to Muncie, IN, where everyone seemed to know everyone else going generations back, and the landscape, in which you could see miles and miles along the crop fields, felt plain and endless. Cole remembers this being the first time that it really struck her that, \u201cnot everywhere is the same.\u201d For her BFA she chose to attend Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Cole wanted to be in the middle of a city, and again undergo a drastic change in landscape and architecture. She then spent some time in Pittsburgh before going to graduate school in Greenville, NC. \u201cI found that there was a lot of relationship and connection, architecturally between things like grain silos and smoke stacks, and the row-houses in Pittsburgh and the tobacco barns in North Carolina.\u201d And while those commonalities exist, and are at the core of Cole\u2019s fascination with structures and dwellings, she is equally amazed by the fact that, \u201ceach area has its own nuances in terms of architecture and how things are built: what kind of materials they used, the different color palettes; things like that. It\u2019s just really amazing to see the diversity and uniqueness of each community\u2019s aesthetics and how they seem to be individual.\u201d When I asked Kat what type of buildings she is most drawn to, she tells me,\u00a0 \u201cindustrial agriculture, factories, and things like that. I do sort of love those forms and shapes because they are both abstract and sort of mysterious. I don\u2019t know what those funnel cone shapes do or what is inside of this structure, or what goes on there. But I know it has a purpose, and function and I have always found that really interesting about industrial structures and those spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

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House Earrings<\/strong><\/em> by Kat Cole: found metal, sterling silver<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Kat Cole\u2019s jewelry is all wearable and much lighter and more comfortable than one might think, being that it is made of steel. But functionality is very important to her. Cole says, \u201cJewelry comes so naturally to me. I can sit and make, and I don\u2019t have to force it; things just kind of come together. I have a very comfortable relationship with jewelry and body adornment. I like to push those limits into a sculptural form on the body, and all of that is well within my comfort range.\u201d Now Cole is also focusing some of her attention into larger sculptural work as well, and finding it very different for many reasons. \u201cWith the scale shift in jewelry, where I\u2019m taking something structural and scaling it down onto the body, its monumental yet intimate and I can understand the kind of balance that it makes. But once I scale my work up, I struggle with it because the relationship changes. The scale is different but it also takes on a relationship to the architectural space that houses this sculptural piece. So there are a lot of things that change when you switch over from jewelry to sculpture and I think that its an area that I\u2019m still navigating through, but its an area that I am getting more aggressively into because I want to figure it out.\u201d And when speaking about her piece, Progressive Landscape<\/em>, which she describes as one of her most ambitious undertakings, she says, \u201cmy reason for pursuing sculpture is because it frees me from the functionality and allows me to explore the narrative, because I can work much larger and I can have many pieces that are part of one larger piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

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