Karen McCreary: An Illuminated Life
“Her unique aesthetic came from a life of immersion in the crystalline light of Southern California. She grew up in the era of the Southern California Aerospace Industry and the explosion of new technologies. Karen attended university in Long Beach.
The wealth of vintage design work from the 20’s to the 1950’s that was found in the second hand stores in Long Beach certainly shaped her aesthetic.The city was a time capsule of Beaux Arts and Deco buildings and monuments. Her artistic influences were the California Light and Space artists of the 1960s and ‘70s and Constructivist artists”
In September 2020, Karen McCreary passed away from complications of cancer at the age of 67. She was a pioneer as a designer, influenced as much by the Aerospace industry as she was midcentury plastic handbags and the crystalline light of our Southern California stomping grounds. Karen was my kindred spirit and best friend, and her loss is a loss to anyone who has ever wondered how they could tame and bend light, turning the abstract into an object of beauty and wonderment.
I met Karen McCreary in the Fall of 1975 in the Jewelry/Metals department at Cal State University Long Beach. I remember her as a spunky redhead when we met, though it felt like we had known each other forever. We shared a love of stray cats and science fiction. No surprise, but we soon became inseparable.
A transfer student from El Camino College, she moved into a ramshackle apartment in Torrance. I remember her being disappointed that our professor Alvin Pine required her to take Beginning Jewelry even though she had already had the class at El Camino. But Al did this for all the transfer students to insure they all had the same level of training as his current students. He needn’t have worried, though. It didn’t take long before her talent and natural ability surpassed most of the students.
The Jewelry/Metals lab became a home away from home for us and we worked after class hours to avoid the crowd of students during the day. Our training in the program was solid and traditional in metal smithing skills but our work was experimental and futuristic. We studied fabrication, casting and enameling as well as blacksmithing with Al’s fellow professor Dieter Muller-Stach, a pioneer in large metal pieces like ornamental gates.
Late into the night, night after night, we listened to an LA radio station that played Vangelis and other space music composers; music that set the mood. We worked with silver up until the price became prohibitive. But no matter. Alternative materials were even more attractive to us. Karen and I were especially drawn to the color and light capacity of plastics.
Karen was fascinated by old machines. She sometimes duplicated a hammer finish paint texture on her jewelry that she saw on old appliances in dusky muted tones. A wide range of industrial materials such as galvanized steel, electrical and plumbing components and plastics became raw materials for her elegant constructions. I watched her take apart fans, lamps and heaters for parts, wondering what they would become in her work.
Her one-of-a-kind work was always centered around light, color and geometry. She was particularly interested in work by László Moholy-Nagy and his use of industrial materials and construction methods. She was intrigued by Larry Bell and other California Light and Space artists. Like these artists, she used industrial materials such as acrylic sheet, paint and aluminum. She colored the edges of the acrylic and color bounced out the other side because of the optic principle of total internal reflection.
To me, her most memorable work incorporated electronic components. Her husband Bob Duckson was an early computer and electronics buff who showed her how to put the electronic components together. Karen discovered that if she placed an LED on the edge of a piece of acrylic, the light would bounce along inside and exit on the opposite side. Her strong interest in science was evidenced in drawings of scientific and electrical principles she engraved into the acrylic. The pieces were always beautifully crafted and looked like exotic artifacts from a future civilization. She did a series of acrylic and electronic sculptures that resembled futuristic robots with light and sound that stood on metal legs. These seemed to recall early illustrations for the Martian war machines from H G Wells War of the Worlds.
She also made many pieces relating to the war in Vietnam and the nuclear arms race. In 1980, she created Environmentally Safe, a large neckpiece that was one of her first ventures into electronics. It featured a solar cell that powered LED lights. This piece is featured in the recent publication In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture by Susan Cummins, Damian Skinner and Cindi Strauss.
Karen approached jewelry as a sculptural exercise, often daring the viewer (and herself) to ask, “What is jewelry? What if I made jewelry that cannot be worn?” Some of these works, for example, her 1980 Gray neckpiece with gas tubing for the neck ring, border on confrontational with hard edged angles and industrial finishes. Lights and sounds emanated from them in incomprehensible sequences. It was as if she was making a point about how our machine-managed world was becoming a dangerous place for humans and all life.
Soon after graduating, we started a jewelry business together in Karen’s garage. I had worked as graphic artist at a screen-printing shop and loved the Letraset transfer patterns, which looked like dots, dashes, stripes and circles. We bought sheets of the patterns and applied them to clear acrylic and then back painted them. After some cutting and shaping, a jewelry line was born. The influence was clearly Art Deco and Constructivist Art with a dash of ‘80s New Wave design. To amuse our friends, we called it MACNAK.
We did our first show in San Francisco (the American Craft Council Show), picked up some orders and we were on our way. The next year we were off to the ACC show in Baltimore.
Our first official studio was in the Jergens Trust Building, a Beaux Arts building on Pine and Ocean Blvd in Long Beach. We had a space on the 7th floor with views of the harbor. Pieces from those days all involved light or sound and looked like mysterious objects from a video game that was yet to be invented. We played around with resin and acrylic. Screen printing replaced the Letraset patterns. Cast mosaics and inlay were created from our recycled scrap pieces. Gold leaf and painted drawings were layered in resin and laser cut. The design process involved experimentation, discussion and lots of “test driving” our prototypes. Now the emphasis was on how wearable we could make our work. Lightweight and colorful, our jewelry designs were easy to wear pieces with a confident attitude that became very popular with our customers.
Pretty soon, Hollywood came calling. At the Santa Monica Craft Show in the late ’80’s, we met William Ware Theiss who was the original costume designer for the first Star Trek TV series. Bill loved our futuristic work and thought it was a perfect match for his current project. They were working on Star Trek-The Next Generation and he needed someone to fix a problem they had with securing the rank insignia on some of the officer’s costumes This led to requests for crew belt buckles, medals and alien jewelry for the show. There was even a pair of purple glitter earrings that Majel Barrett wore as Lwaxana Troi in one episode. (We also did work for the film Star Trek 6-The Undiscovered Country creating regalia for the Klingon Ambassador’s daughter.) When we drove up to Paramount with the work, Bill took us to the set to watch them filming the show. For two science fiction nerds, this was like holy grail heaven.
The paths we take as artists are never straight and narrow. We meander through times and places making work that memorializes each milestone. Change, of course, is inevitable. In 1992, I returned to teaching. Karen continued innovating. Her later jewelry–with carved acrylic lined with gold foil–was a celebration of light and color. It continues to serve as the best representative of a life cut far too short, a bright light extinguished but never forgotten.
I miss her every day.
Teri Brudnak
2021
references:
https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/light-imitating-art-the-magic-of-the-light-and-space-movement