"I just waxed the floors!" Kira yelled to me, trying to restrain her wildly excited pup (who was slipping everywhere trying to reach me). Indeed she did wax, the whole bottom floor of her midtown house was shiny & beaming, not at all like the dust-covered, forgotten wood most of us city kids live on. 'Waxing her own floors', I thought. 'This girl is on a completely different level.'
When I met Kira briefly at the Boulevardia Festival last summer, I had the exact same sentiment. Her handmade jewelry is made up of perfectly sculpted shapes & elegant modern angles, the kind of art that makes you take a step back & steal a look at the artist. As I ran my fingers along the clean lines of metal & wood, I kept shaking my head, knowing that not once in my entire life had I even cut a piece of paper so straight. Yes, a completely different level than me, clearly.
Kira, beautifully, is actually more soft around the edges as a person in comparison to her art. She laughs loud & wonderful as she welcomes me into her home & fixes me a cup of hot steaming tea while she makes herself coffee out of some science experiment contraption. She tells me how she misses the wide open sea & the great freedom she feels whenever in sight of the ocean shoreline. Her slight accent is charming & her face brightens up as I mention living close to Lake Michigan & the longing I feel in the fresh water waves & in the dunes. While talking with Kira, I learned much about her remarkable journey to where she is today, & surprisingly, realized how similar we were on more levels than one.
AA: Tell me about your experience before jewelry, your initial beginnings with wood.
KT: “I’ve always enjoyed working with wood, especially when I was a kid. Wood is such a wonderful, natural material; wood is forgiving. I think I love it mostly because it was alive at some point, & you have to work with it - a give & take relationship. It was fascinating to me. Back when I was finishing up high school in Germany, I had the choice of doing an apprenticeship or going to a university. I wanted to go to a university to study restoration - to restore antique furniture. But in order to do that you have to do an apprenticeship {laughing} so I did an apprenticeship! I was a carpenter & restored antique furniture for about 6 months learning the basics.”
AA: I love that you were offered the choice of apprenticeships after high school, I would have loved to do that!
KT: “I kind of wish there were more apprenticeships in this country, it equips you with different skills. I go back & forth with the idea that I have to decide on one thing to do & do that, but I’m really bad at that. I keep trying out different things that I get excited about. I went to school to be a teacher, but I’m definitely not doing that now. There was a huge artistic side of home economics teaching in Germany, & that’s how I ended up in Minneapolis & then Oregon. Then I ended up moving to Kansas City & worked as a vegan baker for awhile. In the midst of all the jobs & traveling, I was always making & creating something, & soul searching. I kept asking myself, ’What am I really doing with my life? Everyone around me has a career - what has always been there for me?’ & after I sat down, & really got out the red thread string of my life, it all came back to art.”
AA: What prompted you to jewelry after all that time?
KT: “I’ve always wanted to work with metal & I don’t know why. If I was smart & brave about it early on in life, I would’ve studied that. But I thought the ‘right’ thing was studying to be a teacher. So one day I went to the Brookside art fair in Kansas City & met an artist that I really hit it off with. She lived in Hannibal, MO, & invited me to visit her sometime, to show me some of the jewelry basics. I went down for a weekend & we ended up making a ring together, & it just made sense. Working with metal just made sense to me. I left, drove home, & knew that was it. Little by little I bought the tools & just started making stuff. My first pieces were all enamel & copper, very simple & all about practice. I was getting familiar with the material, & very intrigued with color at the time. The work kept evolving into different things, & eventually after a long time, I went back to wood.”
AA: Specifically skateboards, which always surprises people. Why skateboards?
KT: “I started looking at them differently, both the wooden boards & my friends with their skateboarding. They get hurt, get up, & do it again with such passion - this one thing. Looking at the boards - they’re so much of an art piece. There’s the graphic on the bottom of the board that someone designed, & the board itself - color in the ply, it’s so much more. Everyone has a different process, the kind of board they ride, the different trucks they put on it, & then it gets used & tossed out. I’m thinking, that can’t be it. Let's give it another life & look at it differently. For me, it’s about preserving that art work & also the double take - you don’t know it's a skateboard. It nudges people to look at things a little closer. It’s letting them choose how they walk through life & look at things, you can choose to be observant.”
AA: I love your expression that your art is your therapist, can you explain that more?
KT: “When you write, it’s something that needs to come out. Like a musician that plays an instrument, it’s something that’s inside of you coming out, & we all have that something. When I first started making things, there was a lot of asymmetrical work that I did - purposefully imperfect things, because I’m a perfectionist. I realized that if I attempted to make things perfectly, I was going to drive myself crazy. I wasn’t capable of it yet, I was still learning the process & working with the material. I was giving myself room to practice without beating myself up. Embracing imperfection as a perfectionist was really hard, but also necessary, because I was realizing that I was working through this as a person too; this was really important for me to grow. Now recently, I started making squares. So here’s me, this perfectionist, getting a bit more balance, attempting to make these perfect things - knowing that if I didn’t, it’s okay. I’m leveling out my perfectionist ways. The other aspect is that so much of my life right now is out of balance & without shape, & I needed to create these rigid boxes that were my steady, solid, simple thing. I was actually talking to someone about my work the other day & found out that’s why I was making square shapes. My process is backwards from most others in that people have issues they work through, & then create out of those feelings & circumstances. I create my work, & then it becomes obvious to me where I created from when I look back on it. I was making all of these squares that were very pleasing to me, giving me peace. It was bringing me back into balance, a constant where everything that is in disarray fits. That’s where I’m at right now.”
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See more at: Kira Terrey