Judges
Nicole Ringgold
Artist | Silversmith
I have always dreamed of being an artist. I was repeatedly told that to make a living as an artist, I would have to teach art or have a second, more prominent job to generate income until my art was discovered. Even if discovered, however, there was no guarantee a salary would be consistent or sustainable so it was a risky profession. As a result, I earned my undergraduate degree in Sociology and Studio Art, anticipating a lifetime of balancing both.
I traveled extensively, volunteered for the Peace Corps in Niger, West Africa, and returned to the US to earn my graduate degree in Art Therapy and Mental Health Counseling. I worked for almost 15 years managing social service programs and directing non-profit organizations, all the while dabbling in a variety of art forms and doing what I could to feed my thirst for a creative outlet.
When we built our home in 2009 my husband and I incorporated art throughout: glass and stone mosaics, an elaborate mural in my daughter’s bedroom and another one on our pantry door. I drilled holes through river rocks I had collected to create all of our cabinet knobs. When the house was complete, I continued to drill (much smaller) rocks and taught myself how to wire wrap jewelry. My daily life balance included being a wife, mother, non-profit director, home owner, gardener, outdoor enthusiast, and suddenly a determined jewelry artist.
In 2011, I opened an Etsy store, my first step in online sales. For the next three years I sold jewelry through Etsy and local galleries. I slowly expanded gallery support from my small town in eastern Washington to western Washington and surrounding states. With the income from my jewelry sales I purchased my first torch, and eventually managed to furnish my studio with basic silversmithing tools and equipment. Every day after work, dinner, and debriefing with my family, I would retreat to my studio to work late into the evening, teaching myself new techniques with the torch and tools I had acquired. Without any instruction, I learned through making mistakes and giving myself personal challenges, such as 100 hand-fabricated chains. By 2014 I was optimistic that over the next three years I could continue working full-time as the director of a non-profit organization, and save one year’s worth of salary from my jewelry sales so that I could quit my job in 2017 and have a year’s worth of income to fall back on should my artist venture take time to generate any sort of substantial income.
However, in August of 2014, we lost our home and my art studio to a wildfire. We were overcome with grief and overwhelmed. Faced with the reality that we owned only what we were wearing that day, we realized that we could reinvent our wheel, or we could take the opportunity to shrink our lifestyle and leap forward to grasp any opportunity that we'd previously bypassed because our lives were already too full. It was then that my husband encouraged me to quit my day job and finally pursue my dream of becoming an artist.
Fortunately, a local greenhouse opened its doors to me, an ideal space for my new silversmithing studio. With abundant natural light and year-round plants growing in all corners, I never experienced a lack of inspiration. Every day that I entered my studio I found new inspiration: a dragonfly, butterfly, croaking frog, ladybugs, and a plethora of plants.
After the fire, my husband and I purchased a small home, and, thankfully, I received a grant from CERF+ to help with the reinvestment in tools and equipment. I quit my job and dove head first into silversmithing. To say it was a challenging first year is an understatement. While juggling the logistics of home insurance, renewing passports, birth certificates, repurchasing clothes, home furnishings, and getting ourselves back on our feet, I was struggling to find my voice as an artist. I couldn’t figure out how to set myself apart from the millions of other jewelry artists selling online, sharing their work on Etsy and Pinterest. We all seemed to be making similar pieces and pursuing the same market. Even though my work was selling I went into debt. I entertained the idea of building a wholesale business, but was daunted by the world of wholesale shows and bulk orders. I began to spiral. In the fall of 2015 I shut down my Etsy shop and Pinterest account and took several days to hike, breathe, and collect my thoughts.
While I was trail running it dawned on me; I was going to create botanicals in silver. I had seen countless cast plants incorporated into jewelry designs, but never had I seen hand-fabricated plant jewelry. To build the skill set required, I challenged myself to make 30 botanicals. I spent the next three months dissecting 30 different plants and recreating them in silver. By doing so I improved my soldering skills, learned how to form and manipulate metal, and discovered so many out-of-the-box techniques that my work caught the attention it needed to finally establish myself as a notable artist.
I have now been a full-time silversmith for almost 8 years. My dreams have grown to studying and recreating unusual and endangered plant species in silver, thereby joining the movement to educate others about the impacts of plant extinction on the rest of the ecosystem by increasing awareness of their existence. I hope to continue traveling widely to teach and inspire aspiring silversmiths, sharing the message that it is, in fact, possible to make a comfortable living as an artist. My newest goal is to write a book encouraging other silversmiths to think outside the box and push traditional boundaries when working with the precious metal.