Mozelle Art [paintings] [jewelry] • ABOUT

mozelle

[serendipity]I always look for and pick up small objects discarded on the street, and I love to buy other people’s memories at flea markets and in antiques shops. All of these odd bits and pieces add to the serendipity when some of those items find their way into my mixed media pieces.

Encaustic has its own serendipity. The medium is molten, fluid, and sensual. I start with a blank panel and begin building layer upon layer. As I work, my hands seem to take over as my mind retreats into the background and each piece finds its own voice.

New paintings in 2010 are explorations in surface – using plaster on panels, I can build up layers with paint, sanding back to lower layers, adding more paint, and scribing into the surface. This is similar to what I do with encaustic, but without encaustic’s fragrant sensuality.

My mixed media work involves the “story” that I give to unrelated photographs and bits and pieces of ephemera. The elements that come to hand for each piece, and the words I type, or the fragments of writing I add, all tell me what that story is.

I leave it to the viewer to create their own story…

[who am i?]I was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and found my way to Deer Isle about 16 years ago. I am a self-taught artist – although I never attended art school, I have taken numerous workshops over the years, including book arts, encaustic, mixed media, alternative photographic methods, and image transfer. I studied at the Omega Institute (book arts with Paulus Berenson), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Mid-Coast Community Darkrooms, and Maine College of Arts.

I like to think that I began my artistic career at age nine, when my parents bought me my first sewing machine. That little machine enabled me to express my creativity by making doll clothes, pillows, and my first dress – designed and sewn by me, it ripped out as soon as I put it on because I didn’t allow enough space for my body to move!

Paulus Berensohn rekindled the creative fire I felt as a 9 or 10-year-old, and for the past 16 years I have been exploring all sorts of media. When I found altered Polaroids, I thought that was “IT.” Then I discovered I could incorporate those images into mixed media pieces that also used all those bits and pieces I picked up over the years…

[painter]And then, I was introduced to encaustic by Graceann Warn at a Haystack workshop and I truly fell in love. When I go into my studio – to work in this fragrant space with this amazing medium – I am lost to the world.

I have been fortunate to be a technical assistant at Haystack with Graceann in two workshops since my first encounter with her. In addition, I have taught workshops at my own studio in encaustic, mixed media, and Polaroid transfer techniques.

[jeweler]In 2008, I attended a workshop at Haystack taught by Bob Ebendorf, a renowned found object jeweler – and discovered another exciting direction for my work. DUring that two week period, I stayed up late, got up early, worked in the studio long hours learning how to solder, how to make cold connections, basically how to work in a whole new medium.

After returning home with some really wonderful new pieces, I decided to set up a jewelry bench and “light out for new territory.”

In many ways, I have come full circle. Although I have been collecting all that “detritus” from other people’s lives and storing it on shelves and in boxes in my studio, a lot of it has been waiting for just the right project. Now, with the birth of my jewelry studio, I find myself reaching for those tucked away items, and searching all those nooks and crannies as I work on new creations.