Bimetal earrings in 18K and 14K yellow gold and 14K palladium white gold with bullet cabochons of a chrysocolla/ chalcedony/ malachite mixture and opposing shapes in chrysoprase.

Connecting
By Ettagale Blauer

The people Tami Dean has met and the places she has been have all found their way into the jewelry she creates. Her work is an entrancing amalgam of symbols and images that billow up from the connections she has made throughout her life.

Perhaps more than most metalsmiths, Dean designs and fabricates work whose origins can be divined by looking at the path from her childhood to her education, her interests, and her experiences. That path is not always a literal one - it is often highly symbolic - but it is always there.

Fate seems to have played an inordinate role in turning Tami Dean into the metalsmith she is today. So many times was her path redirected by a chance meeting that one cannot help wondering where she would be now had she not met the significant people in her life - or concluding that there would have been some other combination of “chance” encounters to direct her toward exactly the same place.

Embossed, pierced, and appliqued sterling silver and 18K and 14K yellow gold bimetal brooch.

Perhaps chance meetings abound at every moment and only those who are alive to the myriad possibilities in the air see them and turn them to their profit. Certainly Dean makes the best use of what comes her way, bringing the full weight of her intelligence and creativity to her jewelry; certainly those who buy her jewelry profit from her ability to seize those moments and spin them into gold.

Language is the literal heart of Tami Dean's designs. As a student of linguistics and anthropology at Oregon's Portland State, she was deeply involved in the question of how people communicate. Although linguistics was only one of the required courses in the anthropology degree, it caught her imagination. “I have,” she says, “a really acute listening sense, a really good ear. My interest in anthropology and how humans communicate and what makes successful communication is really interesting to me.”

 

Roller printed and pierced sterling silver and 18K yellow gold brooch with lacquer; photo: Paul Yoncheck.

Pursuing that interest, she and a companion traveled through South America for a year and a half, including an eight-month stay in Brazil where she taught English as a second language. From her time there, she learned to speak Portuguese, and also Spanish, the language spoken throughout the rest of South America. She traveled in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, up and down the Amazon.

She learned much more than the languages: she learned about the cultures and the symbols of those cultures. “I was extremely affected by the alternative African influence in northern Brazil. It's everywhere. You ask people if they're Catholic and they say 'Yes,' but they all carry an alligator tooth against the evil eye. Even the white people are entrenched in the African culture.”

Necklace in 18K and 14K yellow gold and 14K palladium white gold. Like squarish beads, each gold "tile" is pierced, inlaid, and etched with a different design on either side; photo: Paul Yoncheck.

In Peru, the home of the Incas, the influences were pervasive, and the pre-Columbian art she had grown up with came to life all around her. “Everywhere you turn there's Incaic and pre-Incaic culture.” (Dean explains that “Incaic” is the currently preferred term among cultural scholars rather than the more commonly used “Incan.”)

Equally important and ultimately equally pervasive in her work, she observed the attention lavished upon the smallest details in people's houses, most especially the hinges and other connectors. “I became fascinated with the hardware in South America, closing things and locking things, hinges and doorknobs. When people don't have much technology at their finger tips, they put all their attention in these things.”

This interest had also been honed at home where she was constantly seeing the work of her father, a renowned landscape architect. From her earliest days, she had been aware of implements, architecture, and furniture. Her mother, of Danish origin, began a Danish import business and, Dean says, “You can really see that Danish modern look in my work.”

Necklace of fabricated, forged, and pierced 18K and 14K yellow and 14K palladium white gold with black glass beads, Holly blue agate, boulder opal, and diamond. Largest element is 2-1/4" wide. Photo: Hap Sakwa.

You can also see modern art in her jewelry: her linear, abstract, playful figures suggest several 20th-century painters, for instance. “The imagery in my jewelry - I would liken it to the people I consider my heroes: Miro and Kandinsky and Klee and Calder, even Matisse. Those guys could really draw. They were looking at specific things when they drew these abstract things. I like to think that's what I am doing.”

Upon her return from South America, she began taking classes at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts. “I took classes there for two years. I wanted to make hardware, and jewelry was the closest thing to it.” Studying with Joe Apodaca, Dean quickly discovered a new world. “After two months, I fell in love with jewelry. The scale was right, the materials were right, the instructor was incredible - I wanted to be his apprentice after two months! After the term ended, he said 'Yes.' I worked for him for almost a year. That was a great beginning for me, learning how his business ran. You have a successful jewelry craftsperson and can appreciate how they run their life and business. It really inspired me.”

All the influences - linguistics, pre-Columbian art, Danish modern, modern art, and those South American hinges and rivets - connect in Dean's jewelry. She turns the hinges and rivets into design elements rather than hiding them as merely functional. The symbols that ornament her work are a language of their own. Although they may have been inspired by pre-Columbian hieroglyphs, the spirals and little lines have been synthesized and reinterpreted by her own imagination to stand as a kind of secret vocabulary that makes her pieces instantly identifiable.

Two brooches from Dean's Bamboo series: fabricated, forged, and pierced sterling silver and 18K yellow gold, with turquoise, opal, rutilated quartz, and garnet. Each is 3-1/2" x 1-1/2". Photo: Hap Sakwa.

Like many other metalsmiths, Dean began working in silver, lavishing her attention on piercing the metal. It is a passion with her. As her work gained acceptance, she soon saw that by turning to gold she could add value to her work and so could afford to lavish more time on each design. She manages to balance both now with some help from two part-time assistants.

“I still design for silver and I produce silver jewelry, but I am not the person who makes it. I do some finishing work; I have very close supervision; it's made in my studio [but] I really miss it a lot. There are things you can do in silver and not in gold. You have that expansive canvas. I want to do the saw-piercing. I miss the physical work. I love to pierce the metal. When it's done well, you can get it to look like a brushstroke.”

Working in gold brings a different kind of concentration to the process. She pauses to consider the difference. “I know what happens: I pay more attention to construction. My pieces are more complicated. There are more constructive elements, more hinges, more rivets.”

Embossed 18K and 14K yellow gold sections with garnets swing below turquoise cabochons in these earrings. Dean is fascinated with hinges and other mechanical connections.

Although Dean works almost exclusively on her own designs, turning out a well-edited collection of earrings and pins, she occasionally accepts commissions, yet another sphere of influence, and one that takes her in a variety of other directions. She goes there, she says, “kicking and screaming. They're difficult. Overall, commissions require a different mind-set. I know that I am going to have to stop and think about what I am doing and push myself in another direction.”

Ironically, some of these have proven to be among the most satisfying work she has done. Commissions have forced her to take risks and to explore, to take the time to try new things, and have brought about the biggest change in her work. “The commission work - that's a time when my work has done the most change. I get pushed out of my comfort zone. When I knuckle down to do it, it really is different.

“I had a commission for a bracelet and I had not made one in years. The woman wanted tons of diamonds. I don't use them much, usually only small; they are not a focus. I put it off. When I got to do it, I never felt so much like a jeweler. I poured the ingot; I forged this beautiful thing. I did it very carefully - it catapulted me into a new realm of jewelry. I look forward to doing more, even though I was scared to death. If I cannot make myself take the time to get on different levels, this does it for me. Someone is pushing me to learn. After the piece is finished, I get such a charge.” That pleasure is reinforced, of course, by the fee for the commission.

This "flumpet," a cross between a flugelhorn and a trumpet by designer/manufacturer David Monette, made for Sheldon Hendler, has been pierced and inlaid by Dean, who describes the collaborative effort as intense. Valve buttons inlaid with turquoise and lapis; valve caps with turquoise. Photo © Joseph Deiss.

Dean's ultimate collaborations may be those in which she neither designs nor makes the piece and in which the piece is not worn but played. In one of those chance meetings that have proven so important in her life, Dean was introduced to David Monette, the pre-eminent trumpet maker. Monette's work is widely admired and used by those who can afford one of his masterpieces.

His world is one of acoustics and music, where connections, like those in language, are made through sound rather than sight. When he saw Dean's jewelry, she says, “he got incredibly excited. It spoke to him. We became fast friends. Eventually I got a chance to see his shop in Chicago. It was a total turn-on to see materials I was familiar with being manipulated in ways I was not familiar with.

“I have learned so much. We work in brass and bronze. There is this sixth-sense design stuff. How do you know this will result in this timbre? It's very intuitive. We get together and talk about the person who is going to use the trumpet. We do a big, long interview. Throughout the process, I check back to be sure I have it right - the symbols, the meaning.”

Every time she pierces a piece of metal destined to become part of a musical instrument, Dean is aware that she's affecting its sound. Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is Monette's concern. “He adjusts the instrument until it plays perfectly.” As a finishing touch, she alters cut stones to fit onto the trumpet valves, typically inlaid with mother-of-pearl, where the player rests his or her fingers.

"After the piece is finished," says Tami Dean, "I get such a charge." Photo: Shannon Spence.

It's a lively collaboration. As Tami says, “Sparks fly. We run the whole spectrum of emotional stuff. We do one a year and that's enough. One year we did two and that was too many. They really take me away from the bench.” And she must wait for the parts, which come to her in a specific order. For the musician, she says, “it's a life-changing thing. It's such an investment; it's such a tribute to themselves.” But it's also very much a tribute to Dean's ability to listen really well and to interpret and distill what she hears about a life into meaningful symbols.

When the work is entirely her own, when she's back in her studio surrounded by the beauty of Portland, the old-growth forests, the majestic mountains, she draws her inspiration from myriad sources. Although the physical essence of Portland is important, inspiration still often comes from the most mechanical things around her.

“Everybody gets stuck at some point. When I am busying myself filling orders, all that creativity gets shunted off to a different area in my brain. I think there are a lot of experiences and creativity to draw from. When I really need to get inspiration, I try really hard not to look at jewelry. It's really important to not be derivative. I try to stretch myself in other directions.”

Just as she became fascinated with hardware in South America, she still returns to the mechanics of connecting when she needs to be refreshed. “When I am wandering around downtown Portland and I see a construction site, I see how they are bolting things together. That finally filters down into my jewelry: I make a lot hinges and rivets.”