Donna Seager Gallery
Current Exhibition Exhibition Archives Artists Museum Links The Art Of The Book
Brooke Battles
More Work by Brooke Battles
Flower Ring, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery   Urban Gardens, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery   Rose Flower Ring, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery   Garden Brooch, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery  
Copper Flower Ring, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery
  Poppy Necklace, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery   Blue Flower Ring, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery    


Red Flower Ring, Brooke Battles at Donna Seager Gallery
Artist Statement

Quite by chance, gardening and metalsmithing captured me at about the same time. And to this day, I am simply mesmerized by the way things grow up out of the earth — the way they adapt with great resilience to their particular little universes. Though nature is predictable (plant a rose, you get a rose!), it is also reckless — it flings its elements about so that nothing ever happens quite the same way twice. Though the search for the perfect rose drives many people, for me perfection doesn't have much personality. I prefer the rose that, in some strange nuance, in some peculiarity it offers up, captures my imagination. That will be the perfect rose for me.

Then gardening took a back seat to architecture. Renovations and homes and creating interior (and internal) spaces took over my life and became the matrix in which my art was formed. My work became more architectural but no more sleek, because architecture may be more predictable than nature, but not by much. Architecture at its best is personal, imperfect, and constantly changing. Like life, like nature, like people, it shows the effects of age, experience, vulnerability, imbalance, limitations.

And in its connection to the earth and structures and all that protects us, my work is an exploration of the female spirit. My shapes are rounded and gentle and full to bursting with some elemental essence of life. They are pregnant, they are yearning, they are nurturing and peaceful. I strive for each of my pieces to seem like a dear friend who, for some special and perhaps indiscernible reason, captures a heart and lives on there.

 

Brooke Battles

The jewelry of Brooke Battles has a resonance between ancient and modern culture.  Her combinations of geometric shapes are wearable modern sculpture, but the finishes and curved edges suggest an ancient permanence. In some works, layered planes of silver mirror mountain steppes, perhaps inspired by her home in Bali.  In others, flat stone-like metal shapes in silver and gold resemble prayer beads or the stepping stones across a shallow river.

Brooke Battles was born in Oklahoma but has lived in many parts of the United States over the years.  She divides her time between her homes in Rockridge, Inverness and Ubud, Bali.  She attended Colorado College and Stephen F Austin State University , studying Journalism and English and spent some time as a college teacher and corporate marketer.  She soon found the corporate world to be too driven and impersonal and began to focus on her interest in beautiful one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces.

Red Flower Ring, sterling silver and enamel
$250

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
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