Stacey Lee Webber is a Philadelphia-based artist and contemporary metalsmith who we’ve loved to collaborate with for years now. Stacey utilizes American coins for the basis of her work, and always has new ideas to turn old materials into new treasures. With permanent installations in locations such as D.C.’s own Smithsonian Renwick Gallery, and the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts, Stacey has spread her love for metal and jewelry work widely across the United States. Today, her limited production compositions and unique jewelry pieces are found in galleries and Americana stores across the country (like ours!). We chatted with Stacey to learn more about the process of creating unique works of art from found objects of the current world and the past.
"I started working with coins in graduate school at the U. of Wisconsin Madison. I began a quest to question the value of labor in a penny sculpture tool series titled The Craftsmen Series. From there I began to manipulate coins in many different ways. I am a trained jeweler and metalsmith, so making coin jewelry was natural."
"I am consistently trying to strike that balance. My husband and I are making a living from artwork and jewelry. So it is always a balance of the project we want to be working on alongside things that might pay the bills in the moment. It's not easy, but we are getting better at time management through the years. Overall you have to really have a passion for being creative and coming up with new ideas to consistently reinvent yourself and your work. We work really hard, harder than we've ever worked, but find it to be the most rewarding, satisfying life passion - we wouldn’t want it any other way."
"I really love working with copper and in particular solid copper pennies (pre 1982). The metal is very valuable and forgiving. It is much softer than what people traditionally think of as metal. I love soldering and working with torches to fabricate objects out of copper and other nonferrous metals - brass, bronze, nickel, silver."
"Oftentimes I try to reuse coin scraps in other pieces, especially if they have been hand cut coins. For example this necklace. I've even made a 'Remnants' wall piece series. Otherwise, sterling silver goes to the refinery to get cash back or metal back."
"I buy vintage coins through Ebay. Mostly in bulk through coin dealers. Sometimes I get really special commissions w someone's old coins or coins that were in their family and make those into jewelry."
"Ann Carrington, Jasper Johns, Lisa Gralnick, Andy Warhol, and Allison Schulnik."
"Probably an hour or so. Some cufflinks are castings of the original cut out coins, others are the original coins cut out with cufflink backings. Everything starts by hand cutting the coins out with a basic jeweler’s saw manually. Then either casting that piece or using it. After soldering the backing on, the cufflinks get hardened in a tumbler and then oxidized. After oxidation, the cufflinks get lightly matte buffed to bring the silver color out and leave the black oxidization in the recessed areas."
The Beautiful and the Damned, published in 1922 by F. Scott Fitzgerald, presents the reader with a fictionalized telling of the perpetually problematic relationship between Zelda and Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald. The novel is not only a landmark in the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but a glimpse into past high-societies wrapped up in a rebound cover of blue leather and hand-worked gilding.