When she was a girl, Sarah Hood was obsessed with her dollhouse. “I love tiny things,” she says. “I used to make tiny furniture, tiny rugs, tiny bedding, tiny food.”
Now, the Seattle artist makes tiny sculptures — jewelry. Her Organic line transforms paper-thin leaves into necklaces, acorns into bracelets, and living plants into rings. The Spice series features cooking ingredients as wearable art. And in Landscape, Hood uses miniature trees, rocks, and shrubs from model train sets, to play with ideas of nature and scale.
Photography by Doug Yaple
Hood, 40, studied metalsmithing in New York City at Parsons The New School for Design and continued her education at the University of Washington. She crafted the Landscape line in her studio, a converted garage in her backyard, by hand-casting twigs from a neighbor’s blueberry bush in sterling silver and forming these into necklace charms and ring bands onto which model materials — bought from a hobby shop downtown — are fixed.
“There’s a funny old couple that owns and runs
the store, and they can’t for the life of them under-
stand what in the world I could be doing with all of these trees and rocks and moss,” Hood says.
And in some ways, neither can she. A good bit of her jewelry isn’t all that wearable. “I love jewelry that’s not really much good at being jewelry, like a necklace of fragile leaves that can’t really be worn or a ring with a four-inch test tube filled with moss sticking straight up from your finger,” she says. “I’m inspired by contradictions. For me, it’s in those intersections of contradictory ideas that the most exciting stuff happens.”
Hood isn’t planning to derail anytime soon. She’s hard at work on a brand-new line using real cast flowers. She was the featured artist at Facèré Jewelry Art Gallery last July, and her work was in an exhibit at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee this fall. Next, her work can be seen at the Tacoma Art Museum starting Jan. 31, 2009, and running through May. —Megan Mansell Williams
>> Hood’s sculpture and jewelry: sarahhoodjewelry.com >> Hood’s wearable works: sarahhoodjewelry.etsy.com
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