About the Programs & Activities

About the Artists

Cigdem Yerli spent the summer months of her childhood in Ankara, Turkey, with her mother, learning craft techniques to fill her time and keep herself engaged while not in school. The experience left her with advanced tatting skills, a technique using tightly woven fiber threads to create lace. After years of designing wearable art and decorative items for herself and her home, Yerli turned her attention towards creating a line of jewelry using the techniques her mother taught her. Yerli’s background in physics gives her a unique insight on the making process, emphasizing precision in technique and numbers.

Tom Perry enjoys creating clay objects that, through their use, add spirit and pleasure to someone’s life. His pleasure derives from the process of forming the vessel while the clay is plastic and malleable. He uses white stoneware and porcelain clays because they produce smooth surfaces and respond well to color in glazes, slips, and within the clay itself. Tom often mixes colorants into the clay to integrate layered and patterned color combinations with wheel-throwing and hand-building processes. Carving into the swirling colored surfaces of wheel-thrown vessels exposes variegated patterns, while stretching clay slabs during hand building distorts and expands original patterns into new designs. Tom is inspired by the always surprising results produced by these techniques.

Younha Jung was born in Busan, South Korea, and moved to the United States in 2012. She specializes in wearable modern jewelry. Her work is site specific, yet universal, because the materials she uses are commonplace and familiar. She often uses re-purposed steel and found objects she has collected from various locations, feeling that these materials represent the specific environment and situation in which they were found. Through her jewelry, she expresses a point of view as an insider/outsider about a particular place in time, including emotional changes that humans feel when adapting to their changing surroundings.

Olga Tarasova is a self-taught felt maker from Daugavpils, Latvia, currently living in Houston, Texas. For the last decade, Olga has been using felt and textiles to create one-of-a-kind jewelry and accessories that provide function and comfort, while being styled with high fashion in mind. She spins and dyes her own yarns and felt, creating pigments and patterns completely unique to the textiles she works with for each piece. Employing a variety of techniques, from shibori binding to laborious nuno felting onto merino and bamboo fibers, Olga’s accessories are lightweight and easily styled with any wardrobe.

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