Art Becomes Them

Not all artists create work that hangs on the wall. Some creative spirits prefer hands-on pieces with textures and three-dimensional shapes that can be explored in a tactile, intimate way-and displayed on the human frame. Although such wearable art has been around since the first caveman outfitted himself in beads and feathers, the field has never been more diverse. Meet some Gulfshore artists who use gold, silver, feathers, stone, fabric and more to produce fantastic creations that may inspire you to decorate more than your home.

Martha Kendall

Martha Kendall describes a lot of what she does as "recycling." In reality, the former clinical psychologist uses a variety of found objects in ways most people would never imagine, creating handbags, jewelry and more. "I think people ignore the real beauty that can be found on the insides of things," she says. "I once made some beautiful jewelry from springs I salvaged from inside a toaster. People didn't believe it when I told them that the delicate wire was simply the spring that makes your toast pop up." Is the former psychologist actually just analyzing manmade goods? "I guess that might have something to do with it," she replies with a laugh. "But basically I love finding beauty in unexpected places."

Her heavily beaded purses start out as frames of chicken wire before she decorates and embellishes them with a wide variety of unexpected objects including parts from broken machines, pieces of antique furniture and other flotsam. She sells them for as little as $12 and up to several hundred dollars. "Making things with my hands makes me happy," she says. "I also like to take things apart and put them back together. It makes you look at the whole world in a different way."

Gretchen Wilson

Gretchen Wilson's idyllic childhood on Captiva Island was a huge influence on her work. "We didn't watch TV much," she says. "Instead we were always outside, exploring and playing." Today her artistic jewelry recalls the natural abundance of the island, with frogs, lizards, fish, dolphins and other lively golden and silver shapes.

Originally trained in finance, Wilson took a jewelry-making class at Edison Community College from well-known local artist Carolyn Gora in 1990. By 1993 Wilson had opened her own jewelry business, the second generation in her family to start a business on Captiva. "My dad built the first golf course here and my mom used to have a store, Christa of Captiva," she says.

Wilson doesn't have to rely completely on childhood memories to create her precious-metal and stone menageries, which range from $25 to into the $1,000s. "I have a pet Argentinean horned toad, a ball python, a cat and a dog," she says. "Aside from that I have two red-headed boys who keep me pretty busy."

Arlene Richards

Arlene Richards is a bona-fide expert on a long list of exotic techniques of fabric dyeing and painting. The soft-spoken artist holds two master's degrees in fine arts and a doctorate in arts education.

Richards is a master of several techniques, along with being a skillful crafter of handbags, scarves and traditional Japanese kimonos from her fabrics. She has even created displays of dolls outfitted in tiny kimonos of the most delicately detailed fabric.

Through her mastery of ancient and complex techniques, she creates fabrics with subtle colors and designs. Each of her delicate, flower-like fabric designs may have hundreds of shades of any given hue within it, all tied into a harmonious whole. They often look like fantastic gardens filled with rhythmic color. The designs may look simple, but closer examination reveals how complex they actually are.

"A lot of the inspiration for my work came from a course I took at Bennington College taught by a Japanese master," she says. "One of my favorite techniques is called roketsu, which is a variety of wax painting using microcrystalline wax. Special Japanese paintbrushes are used to create raised surfaces that become like dams for the fabric dye. When the wax is removed, there are small white lines where the resist was placed and color all around them." Richards also employs other traditional techniques such as arashi (a pole-wrapping dyeing technique), shibori (a folding and stitching dyeing technique) and itajime (a wooden block and folding dyeing technique).

Richards is also well known in Cape Cod, Mass., where she fashioned many of her hand-dyed and painted fabrics into traditional Japanese kimonos. "They are very labor intensive," she says. Her works range from $50 to many thousands of dollars.

Ann McKean

Ann McKean began her artistic endeavors designing sculptures in wood and metal. Later her love of color, nature and plants blossomed into a career in floral design. "Flowers hold a kind of magic for me," she says, attracting her with "the rhythm of their patterns and colors." When McKean moved from her native Baltimore to Naples more than 10 years ago, she made a name for herself as a floral designer before a car accident prevented her from working weddings, parties and galas. "Lifting was out of the question," she explains. "I warned my doctor that I just had to create. It would find a way to manifest itself or else I would simply crack." During a trip to Miami, McKean purchased a beautiful necklace-made from glass from a broken car window. "The symbolism was perfect," she says. "For me, this was a sign for a new beginning."

Now she strings together natural and manmade colored stones, pearls, medallions and other beautiful bits to create jewelry that's as timeless as the stones that make it. Her love of color and shapes is clear. Some of her designs appear to be almost alive. "For me the work is about having fun and creating organic shapes that intrigue and flatter," she says. Recently McKean has started making handbags decorated with colored feathers. Looking like antique hats, the purses sway and float with every slight movement. Her pieces range from the $100s to $1,000s.

Susan Drake

Originally from Orlando, Susan Drake started her jewelry-making career in the back of a jewelry store while she was still in high school, engraving trophies and working with metal and pliers. "I loved it," she says.

Yet like many artists, for a while Drake fought the urge to create. Also like many artists, she found she couldn't resist her basic nature. After college and stints as manager of a jewelry store in Key West, and making casts of teeth for her brother, a dentist-"It's really the same lost wax process I use now in my jewelry," she explains-Drake enrolled in a program at the Gemological Institute of America in California and then spent "three cold, cold winters" in Chicago before returning to Florida. Today her innovative work combines exotic-colored natural stones with fine metals-gold and platinum, mostly-in designs that look "different and risky but are actually quite tough." They sell for prices from the $100s to $10,000. She loves working in three-dimensions, she says, and uses wax "like a sketchbook," etching her designs in the material for customers to see. She's earned five Spectrum Awards ("the Academy Awards of jewelry") from the American Gem Trade Association. One of her award-winning ring designs places channels of colored stones between layers of platinum and yellow gold; it looks as if the stones are a kind of frozen filling between the thick pieces of precious metals. Another ring holds a stone like the needle of a phonograph against a platinum base.

Alice Epperson

For the past 20 years, Alice Epperson has worked as a weaver, creating cotton, linen and rayon chenille fabrics that she makes into shawls, wall hangings, throws, table linens, towels and other everyday items. With a natural, almost antique charm that celebrates the texture of the woven fabric, Epperson's works combine painstaking weaving techniques with designs that look organic, as if they might have grown of their own accord. Their soft appearance practically begs you to touch them. "Originally I did the work for my own pleasure," she says. "But now it's become a career, too." Shopping for knitting yarn one day when she was living in Arizona, she decided to look into making and dyeing her own yarn. Then she moved on to making her own fabric. A friend helped teach her how to weave. Today her works sell for prices in the $100s.

Epperson belongs to the Weavers of Char-Lee (spanning Charlotte, Collier and Lee counties) and has recently held workshops at Robb & Stucky in Fort Myers. She learned her art by working with some talented teachers in Vancouver, Canada, in Paris and elsewhere. Epperson's style is completely her own, however. "I like to use techniques that require kind of a heavy hand," she says. "Nature is my biggest inspiration."

John Epperson

John Epperson, Alice Epperson's partner in art, has chosen jewelry as his medium. Using malachite and turquoise, he fabricates sleek and modern designs for silver and gold pendants, bracelets, necklaces, rings and other items. His pieces look almost Egyptian in structure but are thoroughly modern and New World in execution.