Lindsay Huff

Coming to craft after initially defining herself solely as a poet, Lindsay Huff's literary background has helped her to understand why she is drawn to the arts and why she has a need to be a maker of things. A great teacher and friend once shared a quote with her, its original source long since forgotten but the message remaining: "I don't write to say what I mean, I write to see what I mean."

There is a thrill in the intimacy of making - an intimacy in the scale of jewelry with which Huff primarily chooses to work; an intimacy with her materials that comes from knowing how a piece of copper will bend under her hammer or how a layer of dusty enamel will begin to glow and shine like glass; an intimacy that comes from the study, practice, and repetition of slow-progressing processes. There is an intimacy between herself and the object - wearing it, speaking about it, watching it catch the glance of surrounding eyes, leaving it in a pocket, resting it on the night stand before bed, finding it again after waking; and finally an intimacy between her self, her object, and her recipient - knowing a person well enough to give an unexpected gift, or to know his or her ring size, and to hear second-hand accounts of the recipient's own interactions between the object and the public.

As poets juxtapose unlikely nouns and verbs into electric imagery, Huff chooses to juxtapose found, discarded, precious, and non-precious materials into new wearable metaphors. Each ring or bracelet or pair of earrings or necklace is like a constantly evolving poem, composed not only of her own soliloquies, memories, allusions and alliteration, but constantly edited and shaped by the wearer's verbs, adjectives, past and present tenses, and transcribed anew each time an object is worn.