Odell’s gift; Winters’ golden information

This polymer clay hostess gift from Maryland’s Mari Odell to Taz Chaudry has a lovely story. Mari pressed transluscent faux jade into antique Japanese sweet mold fragments to create the centerpiece of the necklace. The side beads are a combination of extruded polymer, serpentine jade and antique brass.

Mari taught high school art in Maryland and Taz was her student. Twenty-five years later Taz contacted Mari to thank her for that high school inspiration and Taz, now in Colorado, hosted Mari on her visit. And once again Mari had an opportunity to teach Taz art, this time polymer clay.

Golden Information

Elise Winters passes along this interesting link about gold that gives us more support as we polymer clay artists struggle to defend our medium. The article reports that:

The ecologic, economic, social, and political price of gold is far costlier than we imagine. We are in the midst of a new gold rush, one that is consuming wilderness areas, contaminating watersheds, destroying ecosystems, and imperiling the economics of poor nations and the well being of indigenous people throughout the world. Some cumulative, irreparable consequences of mining will be with us, in this country and around the world, forever.

This new gold rush is the result of a converging complexity of circumstances on a global scale, including:

1. The development of highly effective and extremely toxic methods of gold extraction,
2. A continual rise in worldwide demand for gold,
3. The demise of gold as global monetary standard,
4. The continued withholding of enormous stockpiles of gold in the vaults of national banks, and
5. Huge, multinational corporations very eager to cash in.

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• September 8, 2008