Jewelry maker Nora Doughtery on ‘guerrilla craft circles’ and her mobile gallery
You may have spotted it parked at last week’s Church Street Fair: the DIY hand-painted red trailer with “work. shop.” lettering on the side. The mobile gallery is Nora Dougherty’s secret weapon for bringing art out of the studio and into the streets. Best known as a jewelry designer and artisan, Dougherty believes that people are starved for a chance to get engaged in some creative activity. She aims to inspire. On a recent two-month trip across the country she took her 40-foot truck and trailer rig to guerrilla art parties “on pullouts, parking lots and any paved place” from Seattle, across the Sierras, through Santa Fe and all the way out to Maryland.
Dougherty first arrived in California from the East Coast after an idealistic but disappointing stint as a post-college intern in Washington D.C. Coming out to San Francisco, her quest next took her on a life-changing trip to India. “I was still restless, and I wasn’t sure of the next step,” she recalls. “A jeweler friend of mine had moved to Santa Cruz and wanted me to come and work with her.”
Then came a marathon of jewelry and sculpture classes at Cabrillo College. “Cabrillo was so accessible,” she says. “I got hooked on metal working.” Ultimately, the intimate scale of jewelry called to her. Riffing on the graceful swirls of natural formations around her, Dougherty’s abstract rings, necklaces and pendants began to take shape.
Her studio, which overlooks the ocean and fields of the north coast, is handsomely designed using reclaimed items from various north coast farms and friends. It’s equipped with a small kiln, metal presses and a casting centrifuge for fabricating the lost-wax bronze and silver pieces of her jewelry lines.
“It’s very intuitive,” she says with a smile. “I start by listening and then just following. I never repeat a design, and I’m always surprised.” She also resists using gold. “I like earthier metals. All my rings and earrings, things that touch the skin, are sterling and non-reactive metals. For pendants, I use bronze.”
Success has allowed her to send her most popular wax designs to a professional for multiple castings.
“For the first several years I just couldn’t get enough of it,” she says, nodding toward a case of gleaming, burnished and patina’d earrings. To expand a sense of artistic community, she formed the Look Collective several years ago with three artisan colleagues. “We host two shows a year,” she says. “I wanted the synergy of showing work of other artists I feel an affinity with.”
Three years ago the vivacious Dougherty came up with the mobile trailer idea. “I wanted to bring art to public spaces, to places where people don’t have much contact with the arts.”
After much restoration, an old recycled trailer was ready to display an appealing array of colorful prints, ceramics, jewelry, and wearable art. At first, she set the trailer up on a pull-out on Highway 1. “I made these little signs to entice people, and set them up along the road,” she says. A key connection she made during this experiment helped her move further along this public art road. “I met a guy from Seattle, and he later became one of my hosts when I took the trailer on the road this summer,” she says.
Funded by Kickstarter, Dougherty hit the road organizing bohemian “guerilla craft circles” enlivened by poetry readings, movie screenings, campfires, and music. Armed with her canine companion and some pepper spray—“you don’t know who’s going to come through that door”—she held “art parties” for two months. “It was a mix of plans and spontaneity,” she confesses. “The worst part was going over the Sierras. I hadn’t tested the truck enough, and I took a steeper, rather than safer, route in the middle of the night, and the cell phone didn’t work. I was very lucky. The trip back was much easier,” she says, actually breathing a sigh of relief. “Even though the trailer was falling apart, I kept putting it back together. It’s incredible how much you can do with fragile materials,” she says. Everywhere she stopped the art activist was received with “joy and gratitude.”
You can bet there will be more of these journeys in her future. “This feels like genuine experience,” she says. “I’m staking a claim.”
METAL PRESS Metal worker and artist Nora Dougherty founded the Look Collective several years ago, as well as a mobile art trailer. PHOTO: CHIP SCHEUER
