JOYCE GOODMAN
Studio Jeweler
There are no degrees granted to mothers and grandmothers who teach new generations the ancient skills of textile work. There are no committees that evaluate artists on the simple organic pleasures and joys of noticing color, working with fiber, or observing patterns of nature.
The process of crafting a garment, a tapestry, or jewelry out of a thread or wire offers me focused privacy. It is an intimacy born of translating an image in my mind into a tangible, three-dimensional piece of art. These skills and pleasures are hidden within diplomas, obscured by lists and CVs. These are the quiet, hidden pleasures that drive me.
Jewelry is sculpture intimately scaled. Sculpture becomes jewelry on an environmental scale. My work encompasses both, whether a Flying Carpet or an Emerald Necklace.
Writing about my academic education is much simpler than writing about my aesthetic education. I can list the schools, the courses, the internships, and the degrees - interior design, product design, fine arts. Such a list would give you a general sense of the steps I took in my artistic evolution, but, it would not be a complete, nor even a truly accurate story.
The real story starts with an urge to make things. I remember lying in bed at night as a child thinking about something my Barbie doll needed. I’d get up in the dark and poke around the bottom of my closet, or on my shelves, looking for loose objects I could assemble into – perhaps a bicycle for Barbie. I cannot say whether I was ever successful in patching together items I’d imagined, but I liked thinking about them and the treasure hunt for parts to be transformed and recycled.
Though I was involved in the arts through music, theater, and handcrafts during school years, it wasn’t until the start of a career in Arts Management that the maker-ship flame really began to burn in me. After days working with artists and musicians I went home frustrated, even jealous. My hands wanted to create. My mind wanted to imagine, not manage. I gradually found my way to the creative side of the arts by refinishing furniture, working in design, and, finally, earning a fine arts degree.
The creative thread of needlework, first explored in my adolescence, had stayed with me. In design school I began to incorporate the pleasures of fiber work into larger projects: products, furniture, and spaces. Eventually they became essential skills of my career designing and making jewelry as I applied methods worked in yarn and thread to wire and thin metal sheet.
I’ve never tired of the deep satisfaction in simply watching a beautiful object emerge, stitch by stitch, row by row, color by color. Even when my brain needs a rest, or there are other distractions in my life, I can retreat into the restful habits of stitching a petit-point canvas, knitting gloves, or a shimmering column of silver and pearls.
My current series, The Calendar Project, compares measurements of the passage of time across multiple cultures in abstract visual representation, stitched, painted, woven, and printed. Generally, calendars evolve from the observation of cycles of nature. Yet, the multitude of systems, stemming from our shared planetary journeys, diverge in many directions. The Calendar Project explores, compares, and contrasts patterns that have emerged. Stitches in organized blocks of color demonstrate various calendars with years beginning and ending at different times, with various year lengths and leap year patterns. The project presents daybreaks drifting and months wandering along different cultural rhythms, despite shared light and dark originating from the same sun and moon.
In a contentious climate of intolerance and hostility to unfamiliar ideas, The Calendar Project declares different cultural truths, perceptions, and interpretations as valid and deserving of respect. By integrating contrasting interpretations of the same phenomena into rich and beautiful works of art, I hope to present my artist’s hopeful vision of a more harmonious world view - bringing beauty into the world.
The key to all of my work has been an ongoing attempt to bring beauty into the world. I strive to retain the evidence, individuality, and intensely personal quality of the hand. For me the time and care required to craft work of fine quality speaks of respect for materials, for the ultimate user, and, most importantly, for the maker, him/herself.
Another way I strive to put beauty into the world is to advance the agency that craftsmanship accords by teaching and supporting craft related experiential learning. These efforts have taken me as far as Salvador, Brazil, where I worked with an NGO that uses the arts to bring children of the favellas into the larger community, into schools, into a safe and stable life.
Currently, support of craftsmanship and experiential learning involves me with students of New York City schools through Brooklyn Boatworks (BrooklynBoatworks.org). Working primarily with underserved public schools, Brooklyn Boatworks harnesses the craft of wooden boat building and maritime centered exploration. Its programs are designed to inspire young people, to uncover the confidence, skills, and courage to chart their own pathways to success inside and outside the classroom. What could be more beautiful than that?
