Artist Spotlight: Part Twenty-Eight

The artist you get to meet this week is Linda, who calls herself Raedawn on the Handmade Artists Forum.  Her store name, though, is Dreams and Echoes.

Currently hailing from Lowell, MA, Raedawn makes jewelry the same way she has always made visual art - with attention and joy.  Each piece, therefore, is one of a kind and has its own unique character.

She grew up most of her life in Maryland, but sabbaticals in Oregon, Ontario, and Silver City, NM had definite influences on her work.  Her jewelry now includes themes that are primal/mythic, romantic, decorative, contemporary and Southwestern.

Raedawn's beading journey began after working for years as a visual artist, and you can see the influence.  Her visual art had evolved over time into work that was highly symbolic and grounded in archetypal and symbolic imagery, and her beadwork led her to explore the same themes.

Raedawn's jewelry has been sold in several emporiums in Maryland and shown in many galleries in New Mexico in Oregon, but if you want to buy it, you need look no further than her Handmade Artists shop or the Etsy shop.

She's also still active as a visual artist, as is shown by her ACEO drawings.  What's an ACEO?  I didn't know either, 'til I saw her talking about them.  ACEO stands for Art Cards, Editions, and Originals, and are more or less artist trading cards.  They're miniature works of art that you can carry with you, basically the size of a baseball card.

These colored pencil mini-drawings are two from a collection of four of Raedawn's rather poetic ACEOs about the four sacred elements, fire, water, earth, and air.  The left, of course is fire and the right is water.  Both depict the Axis Mundi, the "still turning point," the point just before creation began, where all things are possible.

In her jewelry, she's equally poetic.  She loves to combine seemingly disparate elements, like semi-precious stones with glass, large chunky nuggets with Swarovski crystals, coral and bone with sterling silver accents.

She says she's never met a bead she didn't like, and in the context of her jewelry, at least, neither have I.

She considers her jewelry making to be a journey, and has offered to take you along with her.

To join her, be sure to read her blog, where you'll learn all sorts of terrific things about Raedawn, her art, and her wares.