We caught up with the brilliant and insightful FUSE JEWELRY COLLECTIVE a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
FUSE, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
Creativity and creation have always been important parts of our lives. Before being introduced by a mutual friend, we had both been creating work and operating our own jewelry businesses independently for many years. The catalyst for FUSE Jewelry Collective was really the desire to share jewelry and business with each other. We were desiring more camaraderie and community both in the jewelry industry and personally in our own practices. Once we found that we had similar interests and goals for the evolution of our craft, it felt like an easy choice to pursue the path of creating a jewelry school and maker-space together.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
FUSE Jewelry Collective is the first jewelry and metalsmithing makerspace in Oregon! We are a community for jewelry lovers and jewelry makers of all experience levels. FUSE is dedicated to seeing jewelers in our community thrive and grow as artists. Beyond that, we welcome the community at large to come and experience the magic of metalsmithing whether it’s as a one-time experience, a new hobby, or the beginning of a lifelong passion.
Founded in July 2022 by local jewelers Savannah Hunter and Una Barrett, FUSE Jewelry Collective is located on the corner of 13th & Oak in downtown Eugene. FUSE offers jewelry classes, bench rentals and private studio spaces, as well as a designer jewelry showroom open to the public.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Inclusivity, accessibility, safety, and fun are fundamental to our ethos as a metalsmithing education center. We want people to leave after a workshop and feel as though something they may have perceived as inaccessible now feels like a joyful activity. We want people to surprise themselves with their creativity and skill as they step outside of their comfort zones to challenge themselves in a safe learning environment.
There are inherent barriers to learning metalsmithing such as cost and studio accessibility. We hope to create greater accessibility and safety in this field by offering access to a shared community studio, utilizing as many non-toxic chemicals and recycled materials as possible in our studios, and offering some of our classes on a sliding scale payment system. We are also passionate about facilitating teaching opportunities for local and regional jewelers. As anyone who has been making a living in the jewelry industry knows, its’s a small field and opportunities to make a living as a craftsperson can feel few and far between. We currently have five instructors teaching a variety of workshops and private lessons in our classroom.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
The first step in supporting artist and creatives is understanding why they are valuable in our ecosytem. Once we truly understand the value of these crafts, artforms, etc. we start to understand why we should be investing in them. Education is fundamental to understanding value in our society. Why do we think something is worth investing it? Why do we think something is overpriced or underpriced? All of these judgments rest in our understanding of both the context and process of art and craft.
At FUSE Jewelry Collective students enter the building by stepping into our jewelry showroom. Our showroom acts as a reception area for incoming students as well as a jewelry gallery. It houses hundreds of handmade jewelry pieces designed and produced in house, in private studios adjacent to our makerspace and classroom. Often, when new students walk in they view the work in the showroom and display interest in the pieces, but more often after a student has finished their class and now understands just a fraction of the techniques involved in making the pieces in the showroom, their view of the work changes dramatically. They spend quite a bit of time in awe of the complex fabrication involved in producing the pieces they previously had viewed, but not fully understood the complexity of. We see this expansion of knowledge and perspective daily as complete beginners start working through basic metalsmithing techniques. They begin to grasp what really goes into handmade jewelry and therefore begin to integrate its value and move towards being more informed consumers in general.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fusejewelrycollective.com
- Instagram: @fusejewelrycollective
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fusejewelrycollective
- Yelp: Fuse Jewelry Collective