Heavy Metal—Georgia Women to Watch 2018

In this fifth installment of the Women to Watch exhibition series, Heavy Metal, artists enthusiastically investigate the physical properties and expressive potential of metalwork, long considered to be the domain of men. Featuring hand-built sculptures, furniture, vessels, and objects for personal adornment, the exhibition comprises innovative works by emerging Georgia artists as well as new works by renowned metal-centric sculptors and conceptual artists. Heavy Metal engaged with the fluidity between “fine” art, design, and craft, whose traditional definitions are rooted in gender discrimination.

Lola Brooks
Lola Brooks is an artist, metalsmith, clotheshorse and sometimes writer who studied Fashion at Pratt Institute and received her BFA in Metals at SUNY New Paltz. Her work is influenced by the Victorian obsession with death and sentimentality, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the American Studio Jewelry movement that followed WWII, when artists resurrected an appreciation of the handmade by rejecting the principles of mass production. Lola’s work has been included in many publications and can be found in the collections of the Museum of Art and Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Chuzan Du
Originally from Changzhou, China, Chuzhan Du is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate in Jewelry at the Savannah College of Art and Design, graduating Fall 2016. Her work has an inseparable relationship with her Chinese heritage, symbolizing her own indigenous cultural identity and personal idiosyncrasies. She uses the fragments from found objects in her work to convey emotional attachment and as metaphor to interpret the perception of memory.

Didi Dunphy
Didi Dunphy received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Ms. Dunphy and her Modern Convenience studio have shown at the ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair) for three years as well at the West Coast Independent Design show, CABOOM 2005. Selected Museum exhibits include, Push Play, Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, Chairs Project, Emory University, and Sexual Politics, Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Currently Ms. Dunphy lives with her painter husband Jim Barsness and 11 year old daughter in Athens, Georgia. Ms. Dunphy also teaches part time at the University of Georgia Art School in the Digital Media Department.

Rachel Garceau
Rachel Garceau completed the Core Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts (NC) in 2013 and has been a resident artist at Vendyssel Kunstmuseum (DK) and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN). Currently living and working in Atlanta, GA, Rachel utilizes slip-cast porcelain forms to create site-specific installations.

Julia Woodman
Julia received her BFA and MFA in metalsmithing under the tutelage of Richard Mafong at Georgia State University. Following her schooling in Atlanta, Julia won a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year studying in Finland at the Lahti Polytechnic Design Institute, Upper Goldsmith School, where she became the first American to be certified a Finnish master silversmith. Julia teaches at Spruill Center for the Arts, Chastain Arts Center and specialized workshops at Penland School of Crafts and Florida Society of Goldsmiths. She has won several national awards and her work is in private collections throughout the US and in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia.

Atlanta-based artist Lola Brooks was chosen by Consulting Curator Sarah Schleuning (Dallas Museum of Art, formerly of the High Museum of Art) for the National presentation of Heavy Metal—Women to Watch.

I believe in the power of jewelry’s intimate scale and symbiotic reliance on the body, and the fact that its beauty and materiality have always been poisoned by a shameless celebration of wealth, excess, and debaucheries. — Lola Brooks

Click here to read NMWA’s interview with her.

Purchase the Heavy Metals catalogue here.