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If you tossed a beachcomber/scavenger/naturalist, the inventor of the Rubik’s cube, one of the elves from Santa’s toyshop, and a slightly mad scientist into a very large blender and extracted the DNA, you’d get Dana Driver. Technically, however, she’s a metalsmith and jeweler whose imaginative and intricate work is not only beautiful, but makes you smile. Only Dana would put wheels on rocks, flatten bottle caps into brooches, and use her sense of humor as a main design impetus. I interviewed Dana at her studio in Albion, which is part jewelry studio and part natural history museum. In boxes, drawers and shelves are the found objects Dana has picked up, intrigued by their design, structure, color, texture, and the possibilities for incorporating them into her work. This includes rocks, shells, dried mushrooms,

bones, small animal skeletons, insects, pods, and twigs. You know right away you are not in a typical jeweler’s studio. Dana is a native Californian, born in Visalia, but raised in Puerto Rico, Panama, and points in between. She credits her mother, an artist herself, with her lifelong passion for art. Her real interest in art began during the family’s idyllic sojourn in Panama, where she became an inveterate collector of found objects, such as rocks and shells, and recycled materials. Dana says, “My interest in jewelry started at age 10, when I made jewelry from fish-ing swivels, brass fittings, and anything else that intrigued me . . .” At the age of 14, having already designed jewelry for four years, Dana came home and announced to her mother that she wanted to learn to solder – an unusual, and dangerous, activity for a young teen. Her mother found her a private tutor to teach her soldering and jew-elry fabrication. Her very early influences were Lalique, Tiffany, and Fabergé. Even as a child, she says, she knew the difference between technique and artistry, and also had an early intuitive sense of the need to be “in tune” with her raw materials. After high school, Dana attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she “received a great background in all artistic media.” She earned a BA in Metal Arts from CCAC, then was off to Jerome, Arizona, then a burgeoning artists’ colony. She became involved with a group of artists who eked out a living with a coop-erative store. At that time, she was making contemporary southwestern jewelry, using jasper instead of the more traditional turquoise and coral, and teaching herself gold work. She realized that she had no affinity for the tradi-tional gold and diamond jewelry industry, and continued to pursue her own iconoclastic designs. After the Jerome business venture, Dana moved to the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean, and opened a store there. She quit doing any soldering and focused instead on cold connected work only. She made rings

by Peggy Templer

rock art and bottlecaps: jewelry from found objects

Dana Driver

Flower Pendant/Brooch - Reused bottle caps, corrugated, embossed, patinas, sterling.

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and bracelets of stone and metal, “not that distinctive from other jew-elers, but very contemporary with an unusual ‘ancient’ look to them.” While living on St. Croix, Dana became particularly fascinated with beach stones, basalt, shells and other ‘detritus,’ and began “trying this and that and my style began to evolve. I also became very distressed think-ing about the environmental cost of mining precious stones and metals, and began using found objects and beachstones in my work.” She walked the beaches, searching for and picking up “anomalies” – shells and rocks and tiny fish and bird bones – and then realized the work she wanted to do. According to Dana, this realization came as an urgent epiphany; she felt there was no time to lose to begin doing this work, which was to make art from natural materials, acquired by foraging, and to move completely away from traditional materials. She also at that time felt a need to be a part of a larger community of art-ists, and moved to the Mendocino Coast, where her parents, Dan and Katherine Driver, had retired to the town of Albion. Dana then began the stunning work for which she is best known, in which she finds, pol-ishes, carves and drills beach stones from the Albion shore, and inlays those with soft metals (gold and silver) hammered into the carved designs and fashioned into rings, brooches, pendants, and small sculp-tural pieces. She also began teaching an extremely popular class, “Primal Tech Rock Art,” at the Mendocino Art Center. The process of figuring out how to carve and inlay stone took many months to “puzzle out,” which is one

reason it was so intriguing to Dana. She is always most inspired when confronted with a challenge – how can she make this work? How can she solve the problems inherent in the designs she is creating? This pro-cess of working to resolve a puzzle is what keeps Dana energized and keeps her always trying to do some-thing she has not done before. Which is how she arrived at her next challenge, bottlecap jew-elry. Dana wanted to “recycle some material that’s abundantly around,” and from her long habits of for-aging and staring at the ground, she realized that “creating jewelry from found bottle caps, tin cans, and rusty bits of metal would lessen my carbon footprint.” Her bottlecap jewelry is utterly unique – beautiful and fun. Dana foresees that her next passion will be automata, which refers to mechanical toys or “small sculptures that do stuff.” She loves the puzzle aspects of simple, basic mechanical movement, and has already experimented with her rock beetles with articulated legs and wheels. Dana credits Alexander Calder, whose work she first became acquainted with while attending CCAC, with being her “hero” and a major influence on her own work. The reason for that is that “every-thing he did, it looked like he had a pretty darned good time doing it.” And that is every bit as important to Dana Driver as it was to Alexander Calder. Dana’s work can be seen at North Coast Artists, Mendocino Jewelry Studio, and on her Web site at www.danarocks.com

Die Pendant – Bottle caps, copper, sterling, 14 kt., patinas, fabricated, hinged together and opens to reveal the message “The Die Has Not Been Cast”

Articulated Beetle – brooch-beach stone carved and inlaid with fine silver, sterling.

Flamingo Brooch – beach stone carved and inlaid with fine silver, sterling, 18 kt., Iolite

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S H A S H A H I G B YInternational Performance/Sculptural Artist to Perform at the Matheson Performing Arts Center

International performance/sculptur-al artist Sha Sha Higby is known for her evocative and haunting performances using the exquisite and ephemeral body sculpture she meticulously creates herself and moves within. Elaborate sculptural costume, dance, and puppetry explore magic and emotion, creating an atmospheric world within the borders between death and life. Ms. Higby has performed her unique body of work throughout the United States, and interna-tionally in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Slovak, Bulgaria, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, England, Belgium, Germany and Holland. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. She studied for one year in Japan in 1971, observing the art of Noh Mask and theater and then received a Fulbright-Hayes Scholarship to study dance and shad-ow puppet making and performance arts in Indonesia for five years at the Academy of Music, Central Java, Indonesia. In addi-tion to traveling throughout Southeast Asia to Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), she received an Indo-American Fellowship to study the textile arts of India, and a Travel Grants Fund from Arts International to study in Bhutan. She has also recently studied lacquer arts in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan through the auspices of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. *

Photo by Albert Hollander from Folds of Tea

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Sha Sha Higby could easily be the poster child for the single-child family. An only child until the age of eleven, this amazingly imaginative artist can trace her creative development back to the hours she spent alone in her upstairs bedroom as a child. She was constantly drawing, making up stories, creating dolls and pup-pets, imagining and producing entire travelogues with forests and trails and other destinations, all within the confines of her room. Her mother always encour-aged her to indulge her imagination, and had endless patience for a creatively messy room. Her stepfather taught her to sew and was handy with tools, so that she began making things for their home and friends, dolls with long skinny legs, 100 mice finger puppets, eggs with scenes inside, stories embellished with costume and fabric. She also wrote stories and bound the books. Her mother opened a retail clothing store, but Sha Sha still made all of her own clothes. Sha Sha majored in art at Skidmore College, from

which, during her junior year, she participated in an exchange program to Japan and wound up staying for one year instead of three weeks. In Japan she was introduced to many of the elements that would become features of her own life’s work – Kabuki theater, Noh mask carving, dance and movement, tea ceremony, cal-ligraphy, elaborate Shinto and Buddhist rituals and rich costuming. According to Sha Sha, “Japanese crafts and Noh Theater, with its elaborate costuming and poetic structure, were the major influence on my work.” After returning from Japan, “on her own” as an art-ist, Sha Sha began making installation pieces for galleries, primarily small objects that were a cross between sculp-ture and puppetry strung on threads which “involved a lot of sewing,” as well as the use of carved wood which she learned from Noh Mask Carving. It was during this time that she became particularly intrigued with Butoh Dance performances. “The dancers’ bodies were like

by Peggy Templer

S H A S H A H I G B Y

Above: Photo by Albert Hollander from Folds of Gold by Sha Sha Higby. Japanese urushi lacquer, gold leaf, embroidery, silver filigree leaves

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sculptures and I was inspired by them to final-

ly pull all of these elements together – dancing, move-ment, sculpture, puppetry, costuming and non-linear or

non-verbal story telling.” Her first performance, in which she essentially mounted her elaborate sculpture on her back, took place in a private home. Sha Sha recalls this first performance as “the most exciting thing I had ever done. Everything all came together.” From then on, she did a performance a year, but as the costumes/puppets became more elaborate, the interval between performanc-es became longer. Now it takes her up to two years to prepare the puppets and props for a performance. Over time the performances have become richer, incorporating more and more different mediums, including Japanese urushi lacquer, lighting and sound. Many times after performances, Sha Sha was asked to do workshops to teach students how to create the masks and costumes she uses in her unusual visual and performing art form. She has been a teacher throughout a few decades of touring, and has taught several times at the Mendocino Art Center. On October 23rd, she will be teaching a workshop, “Golden Archetype on a Stick” at the Mendocino Art Center, in which students will learn to cast, mold and recast theatrical masks, and mount them on sticks and add wires and ornamentation to make a spirit catcher. Sha Sha describes her performances as “like a poem or a painting with movement,” in which the meaning of the story is experienced in subtle, non-linear ways. The performances are choreographed to specific points on her

journey but also spontaneous, like a drawing, as she dances along her

way. They follow a progression from beginning to end, but the journey is mys-

terious and unscripted. The audience is an important

part of Sha Sha’s performances. The audience comes along on the art-

ist’s journey as, child-like, she plays with the toys and objects

she comes across, building to a “cre-scendo of meaning and discovery,” which is subjective for each member of the audience. She attempts throughout the performance to draw her audience in by approaching them and by providing them with noisemakers, some of which (bird calls, rattles, etc.) have been made to enhance the story line, as the audience deems appropriate. After the performance, the audience is invited on stage to view the costumes, masks and props. Sha Sha’s performances are evocative of a child on a magical journey, discovering things for the first time, moving from experience to experience, dancing and exploring through the mysteries of life, as every child can, just like the child Sha Sha did alone in her upstairs room, way back in the beginning. Sha Sha’s work has been featured on the cover of Ornament Magazine as well as Crafts Arts International Magazine and Surface Design Magazine.

This acclaimed artist will be performing at the Matheson Performing Arts Center on Sunday, October 24th, at 7 pm. Tickets are available in advance for $16 ($22 at the door). Phone the Mendocino Art Center at 707-937-5818 to order tickets.

Sha Sha will also be teaching a workshop entitled “Golden Archetype on a Stick” on Saturday, October 23rd, the day before her performance, where you can create masks to use to participate in the performance. Contact Sha Sha Higby at 415 868-2409 for details regarding the workshop.

For more information about Sha Sha Higby and to view a movie of one of her performances, visit her Web site at www.shashahigby.com

*reprinted from www.shashahigby.com

The Song (“Naki Goe”) 12’ by 4.5’ by 4’, mixed media including Japanese urushi

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Basket maker and former Mendocino resident Kathryn Rousso has devoted much of the past ten years to research about the maguey plant found from the southern United States to northern South America. This life sustaining plant provides food and bever-age, clothing, shelter and, most prominently, thread for a wide variety of utilitarian objects. Fulbright Award winner Rousso’s research culminates in Maguey Journey: Discovering Textiles in Guatemala. Predating cotton, maguey production’s long history is tied to a continued subsistence lifestyle. Textile enthusiasts will love this book as will ethno-botanists, anthropologists, and travelers to Latin America. Rousso shares her pas-sion for the quieter Guatemalan maguey textiles often overlooked by comparison to colorful backstrap woven cotton trajes. Her approach is culturally sensitive with attention to detail born from years of experience as a textile artist. In Part One, “The Land of Maguey,” we meet the men and women who for centuries have worked this strong and versatile fiber with varying techniques in Guatemala’s distinct geographic regions. We revel in a travelogue of Rousso’s sometimes harrowing research trips across Guatemala since the 1980’s. We meet the gen-erous maguey workers she encoun-tered whose practices vary by com-munity. Part Two, “The Plant to Textile Transformation,” clarifies the biology, growth, fiber extrac-tion, dyeing, spinning and textile production of maguey in a seem-ingly endless variety of structures. Techniques examined include looping, knitting, ply split darning,

linking, interlacing, braiding, and weaving. There are diagrams and references for further study as well as beautiful photos. Rousso explains common equipment including several loom types and the many products fashioned from maguey including ropes, cargo nets, bags, tumplines, horse and mule gear, hammocks, and even fireworks. Part Three, “The Gift of Life,” explores the economics of this most persistent Guatemalan cot-tage industry. In spite of dramatic changes in demo-graphics since post civil war stability encouraged great-er international trade and the incursion of plastic into traditional life, Rousso is enthusiastic about a future for maguey as a sustainable green product. Maguey Journey is a fascinating read about the staying power of this durable fiber and the people who have mastered it. Maguey Journey: Discovering Textiles in Guatemala,

University of Arizona Press, 2010, is available at Amazon.com and through the publisher. Kathy Rousso is the former coordinator of the Fiber Arts Department at the Mendocino Art Center. She currently resides in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Barbara Shapiro is a textile art-ist and educator from the Bay Area. Her weavings and bas-kets are profoundly influenced by traditional and historic tex-tile traditions. She is a board member of the Textile Society of America and recently taught an indigo dyeing workshop at the Mendocino Art Center. www.barbara-shapiro.com

reviewed by Barbara Shapiro

Maguey Journey by Kathryn Rousso

Book Review

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In a magical tea garden at the end of a tree tunnel in Inglenook, there lives a Japanese wizard. He is a pri-vate, gentle, courtly man, who nevertheless radiates a powerful force. He uses that force to transform people into artists. Shozo Sato describes Kamakura, where he grew up, as “a city of 100,000 people and 300 Zen temples: Kabuki actors, Nobel prize winners... a highly moti-vated culture.” Shozo’s father was a doctor, his mother an ardent theater-goer. Shozo was born in 1933, the year Japan left the League of Nations and began beat-ing war drums. “When I was four, my father returned from a house call to find me dancing in a kimono of my mother’s. I started my study of traditional Japanese dance when I was six. Like other boys, I was always being asked what I wanted to become. Boys my age were expected to answer ‘pilot’ or ‘commander’ or ‘soldier’ but I always said, ‘artist’. I was a problem kid, sneaking out of academic classes into other people’s art classes. “It was a blessing: from childhood, I always knew what I wanted to do.” Japanese who lived through the Occupation remember it as a harsh time, but Shozo stayed in his own room, practicing dance, painting, making drama. He attended a fine arts high school and college, taking a degree in oil painting. “My class-mates always talked of going to Paris and New York to become famous artists, but they didn’t know Japanese art. I think, if you want to stand on the world stage, you must know your own native art, and the philoso-phy behind it, because eventually that will come out. “When I was 19, I began to wonder how to earn a living. My childhood mentor, a painting master, pro-hibited selling paintings, because this ‘success’ locks an artist into the style of the sold painting, and creativity

is lost. This becomes a form of prostituting the soul. As an artist, you must not think of yourself as a merchant. So I offered my services to an orphanage for free. Every Saturday I taught art to orphans. In those days, the orphanages were filled with children of mixed races: Black, Brown, White, who were left in little baskets at the orphanage door. Every child has a different way of drawing, and to me their different ethnic backgrounds were obvious. Soon I was teaching art in the U.S. Naval Independent School. My talent for seeing ethnicity in paintings helped me understand that we all have dif-ferent gifts. By encouraging these differences, we can help children find their creativity.” A resurgence in Japanese reverence for culture in the post-war years offered abundant opportunities for Shozo to learn new artistic disciplines. He studied Kabuki with one of the Living National Treasures, Nakamura, Kanzaburo XVII, who honored Shozo with the title Nakamura, Kanzo IV. During this time he also studied Ikebana (the art of arranging flowers) and the Tea Ceremony. He opened a small private art

by Michael Potts

Shozo Sato: Living Treasure

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academy where he taught Sumi-E (black ink paint-ing), Ikebana, the Tea Ceremony, and Kabuki Dance. Shozo recounts, “One day, a tall American lady, a Fulbright scholar from the University of Illinois, came to visit my academy. She wanted to learn why so many Japanese artists practice many disciplines. I told her, Simple: Japanese arts are all inter-related. Because Japan has few raw materials, the only way to survive on the international scene is to produce people with talent. After two weeks of attending classes, she asked me if I would come to Illinois if I was invited.” Shozo took the invitation to be a calling. From the mid-1960s, Professor Sato taught at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He was often invited to other cities, univer-sities, and muse-ums to give lecture-d e m o n s t r a t i o n s , becoming a roving ambassador for the Japanese arts. At the University of Illinois, his Kabuki Theater productions were enthusiastically received, transform-ing the way many

midwesterners perceived their world. Appreciated for his unusual style and teaching gift, Shozo was granted permanent residency by an Act of Congress (90-S-2422 sponsored by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin). “Starting a Kabuki group in Japan is easy: you just go to the costumer and the wigmaker. In the midst of a cornfield in Illinois, you get books, learn how to sew costumes, find suitable materials, make wigs. Striving for authenticity, I learned a lot. I accepted my calling – maybe, more a matter of Karma? – to come to the United States and, being different, make use of those differences with my students, to try to open their eyes and hearts a little bit. In Japan and the U.S., this

was a time of grass-roots peace activity, and activists wel-comed intercultural exchanges. We can-not leave peace up to governments, because industry pressures govern-ments into wars ‘to make a buck.’” In 1967, Shozo was invited to Mendocino by Bill Zacha, whose interest in Japanese

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art has enriched the Art Center. “I thought, ‘ocean, culture, just like Kamakura.’ I didn’t know it was a cold water place, and so on my first Sunday I put on my swimsuit and went to the beach. People were saying, ‘look at that crazy guy.’ Ah! The Art Center, the ocean through the Cypress trees behind it: like Kamakura!” As his eminence grew, Professor’s Sato’s skill as a teacher increasingly called him away from Japan House, his Illinois venue, and all the travel on icy midwestern roads led him to look for a milder climate. Mendocino called, and by 1990 he and his wife, Alice, chose to build his Center for the Japanese Arts in Northern California, north of Fort Bragg. “There is an art to knowing a student’s needs, presenting new ideas in a way that can be understood. University students take courses because school requires them to study different cultures. Older students, coming of their own will, are seeking something: Fun? Meaning? Philosophical background? Every one: different. My left-handed Zen monk copies Sutras, learning every stroke backwards. It is impossible. In Japan, everyone learns to write with their right hands because Japanese is a right-handed system. I challenge each student with something exotic, entertaining, so, before they know, they are seri-ously studying. First, catch their interest, then gradually, like training a wild horse, sprinkle sugar cubes, carrots, whatever the horse likes...” Zacha’s interest in Japan kept the Art Center gazing westward, resulting in Mendocino’s sister city relation-ship with the town of Miasa. “I am pleased that the Miasa program carries on,” Shozo says. “The Art Center can present events that open hearts to Asian sensibilities.

Once our hearts open, we will maintain our quest for mastery of the art of life. It is an honor for me to have an opportunity to present this Japanese attitude to people who honestly wish to learn. “You see,” he continues, “Japan honors culture. For example, during a political campaign, people bring a nice piece of paper to a candidate and ask him to do some calligraphy. If they like what he paints, they vote for him. Calligraphy is a very revealing art and can show the qual-ity of a person. In other disciplines, materials change, subjects differ, but the center of the self stays the same.” To share his art more widely, Shozo has produced four gorgeous books, two authoritative works for adults, Sumi-E: The Art Of Japanese Ink Painting and Ikebana: The Art Of Arranging Flowers, and two for children, Tea Ceremony and Ikebana: Asian Arts And Crafts For Creative Kids, all published by Tuttle. As befits a wizard, Professor Sato circulates, ageless, graceful, and wise, among his students in the workroom of his Inglenook academy, guiding a hesitant hand, whis-pering encouragement. A local physician looks up from a finished character. “This is harder than heart surgery,” he confesses. The wizard smiles.

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