Artist and jewelry designer Debra Baxter creates incredible sculptures using a combination of rock, metal, and glass.
If you could give mourning a physical form, what would you choose? That’s one of the questions Debra Baxter tries to answer in her solo show, Love Tears.
The artist and jewelry designer melds geodes, metal, wood, and glass into surreal sculptures that explore complex human emotions, such as love and loss.
Baxter began creating these works to remember a friend who had passed away. This period of mourning made him contemplate how to commemorate things that are essentially ephemeral in nature.
“There is inevitable pain in all forms of love,” Baxter explains. “I am fascinated by the ways we decorate this grief and mourning, and wanted to see how far I could go with the balance between the immediate, often ornate display of loss, and my use of permanent materials. It’s about grief and his legacy.”
While some of these pieces take on a figurative form, such as a pair of lungs or a heart, others are abstract representations of feelings. Love Hard, for example, is made up of a blown glass human heart resting on a white quartz pedestal.
These two materials are not only known for their longevity, but also for their brittleness. Thus, by transforming these delicate media into a part of the human anatomy, Baxter highlights the vulnerability of our own hearts.
Similarly, Golden Heart (Almost) is a bronze and crystal representation of the heart that highlights the beauty of deep, and often painful, emotions.
