Before I saw the artist, I thought it was going to be a man, but that's irrelevant. Chris Irick is a metalsmith, and she talked to us about her career as a metalsmith and the type of work she produces. She is also a teacher. She was featured in a series called Tributaries at the Metals Museum, which features contemporary artists the museum feels are making an impact in the arts.
Ms. Irick's family moved a lot when she was a child, and by her late teens she had moved twenty times and had lived in about 12 different states. The introductory piece on the slideshow was a charm bracelet she had made, with engravings of the States she had lived in on the plates. Ms. Irick told us that she grew up watching nature shows and the Discovery channel, which is how she developed an interest in adornment in other cultures and their jewelry. She also has metalworking in her blood, with both of her grandfathers having been metalworkers/artisans and her father as well. When Ms. Irick first took metal arts classes in a high school in Texas, she became very interested in formal techniques. At the age of nineteen, she became the first undergraduate student to be featured in the American Craft magazine. She attended a concept-driven graduate school in Massachusetts. While in college and grad school, Irick learned a to produce work using a number of techniques, including dye-forming, carved acrylic fabrication, raising, sawing and piercing materials, soldering, hand-carving, casting and fabrication.
Throughout her education, Irick retained her interest in adornment in other cultures and her fascination with nature, but her interests also diversified; she became interested in working with industrial and scientific subject matter. Ms. Irick mentioned that she prefers to work on small-scale projects, most of them small enough to be cupped in one's hand. But the techniques and detail that she uses in her work creates a deceptive sense of depth. Irick does a lot of perspective pieces, using tromp l'ouel and shifts in scale to create foreshortened interior elements and receding spaces, such as hallways and tunnels. Her influences include nature, industrial designs, decorative elements, scientific subjects-- engines, airplane models, turbines, early flying machines--, birds, Victorian hair jewelry, Victorian manhole covers, armor, industrial connections, manholes, isolated spaces, stairwells and maritime influences and images. A lot of the works she showed us exhibited the perspective techniques, using stairwells, tunnels and isolated spaces or maritime imagery. She also showed one piece, which she talked about combining the formal aspect of jewelry design--creating a lenticular--with the movement of a flock of birds.
I don't remember an exact quote, but one thing I remember Ms. Irick talking about was a couple of her college metals instructors. She spoke of what a big influence they had each had on her and that they were her mentors at some point. She said they also encouraged her to push herself and her work, and one of them has even published a book. That stood out to me because it reminded of the days in K-12 that there would be some essay contest of one sort or another that asked you to write about someone who influenced you or inspired you, or talk about a teacher who made a big impact in your life. It also made me wonder, do people suppose that every one who is successful has a teacher-mentor? And, have I had one and just didn't realize it, or will I get one someday?
All of Ms. Irick's work clearly exhibits her conceptual training and scientific/historical tendencies. The presentation was well-organized and informative, but the speaker herself got slightly boring to listen to at times because of her dry tone. Fortunately, all her work was interesting enough to keep us awake.
