'Found' objects most fun for artist

Rik Nelson  /  Correspondent

Pat Boyd shows off a recycled creation using a skiing theme. She made it from old pins and scrabble pieces. (Photos by Kathryn Stevens / The Spokesman-Review)

"I hit pay dirt when I find people who have boxes of stuff I can rummage through," says jewelry-maker Pat Boyd. "I just found a bag of watches at Goodwill. I love breaking up old pocket watches."

But clearly, Boyd loves putting them back together even more – in beautiful, unique, highly organized ways. Her brooches and pendants are really miniature, complex assemblages, or sculptures, constructed from both common and unusual "found" objects.

Boyd calls these objects "parts" and looks for them at thrift stores, yard sales, and antique stores. Besides watches, she culls out beads, stones, Scrabble tiles – even computer circuit boards, to recycle into jewelry.

She looks for parts when she travels, too. On a recent trip to a hill town in France near the Riviera, she discovered a box of "treasures" in an antique store.

"There was a pair of 1920s-era sun glasses with lovely mustard-green lenses," she recalls. "A perfume canister that looks like a stopwatch; a skeleton key with worn-down teeth; gemlike ocean-washed glass and terra cotta from the beach." Boyd revels in the particular details of each piece, its patina, its pattern, the nostalgia it evokes.

With whatever materials she chooses to combine into a piece of jewelry, Boyd makes a little go a long way. A simple, yet elegant, brooch of a dancing lady was cut from a piece of an old pie tin. Boyd has dimpled the surface with a ball peen hammer to let light "dance" across the lady's body.

For similar brooches she has used sauce pans and cookie tins as her raw stock. To texture them, she first overlays a screen mesh, and hammers its grid into the aluminum. Then she inks the entire piece with a black Sharpie pen and buffs the surface to highlight the aluminum again, leaving only residual hairlines of the black grid. So simple.

Mechanically simple, yes, but conceptually deft.

Boyd says she started early learning the ways of art.

"As a kid I'd go to my room and paint," she says. "Mother always encouraged me. She'd wanted to be an artist herself but being raised during the Depression had no opportunity."

So Boyd jumped at the opportunity to pursue artistic endeavors and from elementary through high school took every art course offered.

"I don't understand how kids today can have an education without art," she says. "Visual skills are so important to all kinds of problem-solving and communication."

She should know. After graduating in advertising design from the University of Illinois/Champaign-Urbana, she used her persuasive visual skills as a graphic artist in Chicago and San Francisco. From that advertising world, Boyd brings to her art world discipline and a highly-refined eye. Her sophisticated works, economical in their use of parts, yet arabesque in overall composition, intrigue and reward the eye of the beholder.

Like her creations, Boyd's creative process is both simple and complex.

"I lay out likely pieces, then start gluing and clamping," she explains. "They need to dry, so while I wait, I start another."

Boyd says she works on multiple pieces at once because in their various stages of "doneness," ideas from one bounce to others and then back and forth. "Things selected for one piece might look better on another," she says. "Their 'conversations' make all the pieces more interesting than they'd be otherwise."

Besides jewelry, Boyd also creates larger assemblages in shadow boxes. Again, she transforms society's cast-offs, like a broken cuckoo clock, into works of art.

"I'm always fiddling with something," she says. "The shapes and possibilities excite me and instead of their being thrown away, I can use the pieces to make something fun that makes people smile. I like that."