"The trained hand does not forget its skill, nor can we lay the precision and speed aside: strength we have, and courage in the acetylene will."
The diminutive, dark-haired jeweler Kate Ellen recites the line from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, from memory.
"Metal itself is inspiring, adds the twenty seven-year-old jewelry designer, "It is a really weird property--it is really strong and it's also malleable. If worst comes to worst, and I blow something, I can melt it down and then it becomes a raw material again."
The dichotomy of fine poetry and hard-edged metal, is the inspiration for this artisan's totally hand-crafted and completely unique jewelry designs.
What makes her pieces so individual, is that they are at once elegant, industrial and organic. The jewelry is round, wiry, soft, hard, glittery, matte, fine and bold. Nearly all of the pieces are one of a kind.
Kate Ellen hasn't always been a metal-worker.
She grew up in West Marin and seemed destined for a life in service work. She majored in Social Work and Public Health at Cal State Monterey Bay and worked mainly in non-profits during the last several years, including a stint with Teach for America in the South Bronx.
How did she become a jeweler?
"I always liked jewelry, but I could never afford what I wanted to wear," she says, "It started as a hobby...just one day I was sitting there and I looked up jewelry-making online."
She wound up taking a class at a fire-arts studio in Oakland called The Crucible.
"I've always been drawn towards tools. [In my family] there's a lot of 'Well we don't have it, so I guess we'll have to make it'. I've always felt comfortable around that stuff, so when I took the class it was amazing and I felt like immediately that my hands knew what to do."
Kate Ellen's father is a construction worker and her mom worked in the beauty industry. Kate Ellen says she has 'this style that is somehow a marriage of my parents'.
She uses silver, brass, gold-fill and sometimes copper wires, tubes and flat-sheeted metal to create her pieces. Although Kate Ellen doesn't use gems, she use stones, like turquoise but she leaves them in their natural state.
"I take wire, and then I solder tubing, screw threading. I'll hack up pieces and put it back together."
Kate Ellen takes off her dangling earrings to show us a bit of the process-
"You light the end of the wire and it balls up like little pins, and then you drop it in the pickle solution which is a low grade acid which creates a matte, white look on the silver."
She also crafts the jewelry to interact in unique ways.
Screws
with wiring snaking up and down becomes a pair of earrings; a chunk of
unpolished turquoise bolted between a round piece of metal is a ring;
thin gold tubing with a tiny silver screw that moves back and forth is
an elegant brooch.
The pieces don't look it, but they are deceptively comfortable to wear.
After Kate Ellen left The Crucible, she continued to create her jewelry with wire and lower cost materials while she worked at odd jobs supporting herself. Her personal life was taking her all over the place, including a short stint in North Carolina for a romance.
The end of that relationship prompted her discovery of St. Vincent Millay and was the turning point in her jewelry-making-
"Part of my return from North Carolina was that a romance had ended. I had a very, very bruised heart and I randomly picked up a book [Edna St. Vincent Millay] off my Aunt's shelf...I came across this line, "The trained hand does not forget its skill, nor can we lay the precision and speed aside: strength we have, and courage in the acetylene will."
Kate Ellen was inspired by the line to switch from using an oxygen
torch to acetylene torch in her metal work, and that line also became
the genesis of her first jewelry collection, "Acetylene Will".
Music is also an inspiration, and often provides lyrics for the names of the jewelry, each piece of which is individually named. Love is not All is a bracelet of gold fill and fine silver discs; the turquoise ring is named Prayer for Little Girl Blue and an exquisite, silver-wired bracelet which looks electric, is called Voltage.
It's clear from the names, the designs and the inspiration, just how personal the collection is. Kate Ellen concurs-
"This collection was--not to be totally cheesy--a huge, spiritual transformation for me on so many levels," she says, "To be able to do what I wanted despite what other people expected of me...to set out on my own. Beyond that, it was cathartic, as far as feeling heartbroken and disappointed and wondering what the hell I was going to do. So there's a lot of me, in every single piece."
Kate Ellen is having a special one-day exhibit and sale event this coming weekend in Fairfax--
Sunday, December 13th at 1608 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Prices range from $70 to $400.
For more info, check our events calendar here.
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To view more of Kate Ellen's work, check out her website here or her facebook page here.
To purchase Kate Ellen's work, or commission a piece of jewelry, you can contact her at her email.
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