About the Process | Janet Cooper's Web Journal

Sites Of Interest

housewife.splinder.com
...recycling
...craft
...women artists
www.stevebruntlett.co.uk
...This winter I spent three weeks in India, mainly on a textile tour of Rajasthan. Steve Bruntlett, one of my fellow travelers, has put his lovely journal, sketch book and photos on his web site.
DLMWeb
...dlminton web services
...making the web WORK

Karin Ling
...Through her creations, Karin Ling explores faraway places and brings back stories.

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About the Process I make things as much as I collect them.
These pages present recent work in Assemblages, Tin Can Jewelry, Tin Can Statues, Purses, and Dolls.

There is a marvelous French word with no exact English equivalent that describes in part what I do. Bricoleur. Used by Claude Levi-Strauss to describe the builders and maintainers of myths, "bricoleur" literally means a tinkerer or a jack of all trades. A bricolelur is the artisan who creates from what is at hand, rather than from a set list of needed components to achieve an end.

After years of working with Clay, both as artist and teacher, I was inspired in the 1980’s by a collection of old rusty Bottle Caps and began BOTTLE CAP JEWELRY INC. In the years that followed, this work was sold by stores, galleries, catalogs, and museum shops through out the United States, Europe and Asia.

I accumulated a million vintage bottle caps, thousands of tobacco tags, hundreds of vintage tin cans (and boxes of miscellaneous vintage fabrics, buttons, and bits of embellishment). My collections of discarded objects inspire me to celebrate the commonplace, the past, and visual.