Jan 25, 2018 6 min read

This is the first in an occasional series highlighting local artists.

Michelle Sabol, 49, of Washington

Tell us about yourself: This year marks my 20th year of being an independent artist, creating one-of-a-kind art-to-wear jewelry under my business name, Memphis George. I started out in Los Angeles, selling my work to boutiques and private clients in the film and TV industry, as well as being represented by such galleries as the Gallery of Functional Art in Santa Monica, Calif.; Julie Artisan on Madison Avenue in New York City.; and Gallerie Chiz in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I’ve had my work worn to the Oscars twice and owned and operated my own gallery in Los Angeles from 2011-14. I proudly participated in the Three Rivers Arts Festival from 2001-15 and am a longstanding member of the Craftsmen’s Guild of Pittsburgh, where I show my work annually at A Fair in the Park every September.

Artist statement: My ultimate goal as an artist is to create a space of potential and allow myself to be present in a loose but focused way so possibilities can manifest. This basis has enabled me a certain fluidity between mediums. From theater to poetry, to avant-garde film and sculptural art-to-wear, as an artist, I’m giving myself over to the originality available in true potential as my wellspring of creation.

For example, each piece of art-to-wear jewelry that I create is a response to an ephemeral dialogue that seeks to be expressed in my making myself available to the conversation. Metals, rocks, sticks, gemstones, minerals, etc., all have their own expression that I’m looking to harmonize. I believe this openness to and collaboration with elements lends itself to successful partnerships across many creative mediums.

Essentially, my working model as an artist is that the artist is the art: the fertile ground that ideas seek in which to grow. The better I engage my own specificity, the clearer and more refined my vision as an artist and aesthetics become. There is no end to this process, as it engages me to be consistently present and evolving.

In the capacity of creating sculptural art-to-wear jewelry, I carve wax and do lost-wax casting. I create molds in order to cast objects. I’m a traditional metal smith and employ soldering and hand-fabrication techniques. I’ve also embraced divergent materials with which to create my pieces, such as stitched and painted canvases; soft-stuffed sculptural fabric techniques; a wide variety of epoxy resins that I use in liquid and clay forms; Plexiglas that is carved, heat-formed and painted; paintings that are done on paper and plasticized; glass test tubes and beaker tops from science labs; lightning-struck sticks; roots from stumps that have been blasted from the ground; marbles; toys, etc.

I derive great pleasure from permitting myself to have creative ideas that I may not have the existing knowledge to create, and then discovering new ways of working with what, at times, may be very unlikely materials. This allows me to be experimental and to originate new techniques and ways of engaging the potential of the objects.

What are you currently working on? I’m in the planning stages of an upcoming two-year teaching artist residency, where I will be working with a group of Washington Junior High School students through a grant from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and the Rural Arts Collaborative. During our first year, we’ll create lighted sculpture from the historic glass shards and bottles that were excavated from the original site of the Cameron Coca-Cola Bottling Company, which is now the Center on Strawberry, Washington, where the piece will be installed. Two lighted sculptural wall pieces will be created during the second year of the project. One of the pieces will be installed at Washington High School and the other at Citizens Library.

I also am a contracted teaching artist in Pittsburgh Public Schools through the City of Pittsburgh’s CitiParks.

What is your assessment of the local art scene? Even though I know there are clusters and groups of cool scenes that I’m surely unaware of in this region, I’m older and not steeped in the art atmosphere enough here to really say. Pittsburgh has so much going on with public art, gallery crawls, museums, arts and cultural programming, etc. Quite a few talented artists live in Washington.

What I think of as an art scene, which may be old-fashioned now, tends to have a collective feeling of danger, of creating a new language in expression or a spontaneous coming together of passionate, philosophical artists which challenges and informs the culture. If I went looking for it, I’m sure I would find more of that, but I’m kind of too busy or too tired. I think it’s actually pretty rare to find anywhere.

Where can we see your work? You can see my watercolor painting series, “The Part is the Whole” that I’ve printed onto skirts, kimonos, bags and scarves at MemphisGeorge.etsy.com. I will have a trunk show with my jewelry and accessories at La Pomponnee Beauty Artisans in Mt. Lebanon before Valentine’s Day, so check out my Facebook business page, Memphis George Fine Art-to-Wear Jewelry and Gallery or my MemphisGeorgeJewelry Instagram for details. I’ll once again open my private showroom and studio to members of my mailing list for a show in June, where I hope to debut a new line of dresses using textiles printed with my intricate artwork, as well as new jewelry collections featuring rose-cut sapphires in hand-fabricated gold and sterling silver and mixed media wearable art.