Back to the Garden featuring silver work by Kim Harrell

When presented with the opportunity to create work for my first solo show I searched for inspirational focus in my childhood, my history as a maker, my garden, my personal interests beyond art. I would say, Back to Garden is an amalgamation of all those things.

As I explored my youth, I recognized what a large part music played. I grew up in a household of eclectic taste from Bach to Beatles, Miles Davis to Devo, Jesus Christ Superstar to Supertramp. It was the music from the 60s, 70s and 80s. After I left home, I found myself longing for the sounds of music I did not have to hand but that I grew up listening to. When I could, I recorded iconic albums from my father’s extensive music collection. One of them was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà vu. The song Woodstock contains a refrain:

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

My search had ended. Those words put everything I wanted to achieve in this collection into three lines. You could say the collection is an homage to the power of nature and my personal spiritual beliefs about our connectedness to everything in the universe: everything is everything. I find this connection most profound in the act of working in the garden and in creating art. It is experiential, analogous, spiritual and bound to the laws of the natural world which, as human beings, we have little control over and often struggle to find harmony. The artworks retain my signature emphasis on material, texture, line found in my jewelry. However, as the scale has been increased the work will invoke a greater sense connectivity, simplicity and beauty.

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This is the first solo show for Kim Harrell. Mai Wyn Fine Art offered her this opportunity after seeing her spoons for the first time. Kim has been showing her fine art jewelry with Mai Wyn since 2015.