Next on Gallery America, we meet a Norman artist who begins her painting process with a walk in the woods.

Sometimes it doesn't work out.

And in some paintings, it just feels so good just to set on fire.

Wait.

She burns the paintings.

We'll find out why.

Plus, meet four more women artists who have very different ways of creating art.

And it begins now.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America, the show that looks at creativity and art in Oklahoma and around the nation.

And today, we are going to be meeting five women artists who creates art, looking at their nature and their surroundings and their environment in very different ways.

And that's certainly the case with our first artist today here in Norman, who works in a place that she calls the Cloud House.

Meet Mary James Ketch.

I love fire.

I love fire.

It's so magical.

You know, I've always loved fire.

I've always loved candles, fireplaces.

It just feels very cathartic.

I get up around seven to take my dog for a walk, and during that time, I just try to breathe, be present, you know, and just acknowledge what has changed from the day before and just try to check in with the world.

We are in my brand new studio and I was considering calling it the Cloud House because when I come from my house and walk here, well, the first thing I see is the sky and it feels like it's a cloud in the sky.

And as an artist, you've kind of always been told you have your head in the clouds.

And I thought, Yeah, I do.

I like things that are dreamy and kind of all washed together and it could be anything landscape for people.

So my paintings usually don't have a face, you know, I don't want there to be a barrier for you saying That's me.

I want them to see themselves in my paintings.

I found myself at home with two kids.

Painting was something that I could do while my kids were here, and I just picked it up and I just loved it and brought me a lot of joy and pleasure.

During the pandemic, I started doing sort of expansive outdoor scenes, and I'd always been in the creative arts, but now I was sort of like stuck at home.

And I just created this series to sort of like capture what I'm feeling and what I'm thinking about during these morning walks, what I see out my window, what and how nature is responding to life and what it has to teach me.

I am always looking to surprise myself.

That's my favorite thing.

It's like, Oh, I didn't know that was going to happen.

But sometimes it's an exploration that just leads to nothing and you work on it.

And I think about it and I put it aside and I think I'll come back to it and I'll figure it out.

And then some paintings.

It just feels so good just to set them on fire.

Because then you think, I never have to think about this painting again.

It's like, cross that off my to do list.

But for some reason it really upsets people because I've shown it on Instagram a few times and I'm like, burning this painting.

I feel so good.

And they're like horrified.

Like, how can you burn something?

And I'm just I think that they think everything I create is masterful, but it's not.

It's just part of the process.

I mean, I could throw it away, but that just doesn't feel ceremonial enough that something very ceremonial about fire.

And the other thing is, I think a lot of people have a real hard time with failure.

What artists don't we embrace failure.

We express it as experimentation.

The same way a scientist was just like, Yeah, I tried.

It didn't work out, but the risk is where the play comes in.

That's where the magic comes in, and you just accept that if you're playing, you're going to fall down sometimes and it's not always going to work out and you just keep going.

Yeah, I think space is as much gift as stuff is.

That's why I'm so lucky, because I have the space, but the one piece of nature that most everyone has is the sky.

And even if you're walking on a city street, you have the sky to connect with.

Oh, hi.

You can see more of Mary's artwork by going to her Instagram page @ Maryjamesketch next for meeting an artist in Ohio who also takes her inspiration from nature.

But she creates her work using glass, even though that's the one thing she never wanted to use.

The results are fantastic.

See for yourself.

As I was living in South America for a long time, I would come home on different visits and my mother was making stained glass and she kept telling me, Oh, this is so much fun and you should do this.

And she made windows and lamps and I just kept saying, Mom, no, I don't.

I don't follow patterns.

I don't measure anything.

There is nothing about stained glass that attracts me.

My husband died when we moved back here, went on a double date with some friends, and we went to a place that did Glass Mosaic, which was really fun, except that it was both those little tiles.

And I made a tray and I took it.

I showed it to my mom and I said, Here, look at it.

And she goes, It would look a lot better if you made it out of glass.

I said, Oh, you know, what would?

And so she gave me a box of glass, and I went down to my basement with a glass cutter and started beating things up and started making mosaic out of it.

And it was just really fun.

I just became fascinated by the colors, the different, different kinds of translucence and the incredible possibilities the glass has.

And then eventually I thought, well, I kind of I really like the mosaic.

I like working with glass, but I'd like to have it be a little more painterly.

I wanted the colors to kind of blend together better, and I didn't know how to do that with glass, so I started getting interested in the Fuzed glass, and with Fuzed glass I was able to overlap and interplay in ways that I hadn't been able to do before, but it still wasn't quite what I wanted.

And I kept experimenting and experimenting.

And then just by chance, I heard about a class by a guy who made the world's largest stained glass window at 4000 square feet at Tim Carey.

And he is an amazing instructor and he shows you how to make your own sheets of glass and how to get the colors to kind of meld together.

So I could add, you know, five, six, eight colors if I want a glass into a sheet.

And as it melts together than it was with Fred and all kinds of little pieces of glass, it turns into something completely different.

And so with this whole body of work that we're looking at today has been made with that technique, when I try to explain to people that first glass is warm, glass is kind of hard to figure out.

Oh, they'll say, Did you blow this?

And so what's what's very important to know about glass is that this is cold glass.

It is it is worked cold.

It's put together cold.

And it always stays flat like that.

This is a piece that my mother made years ago.

And then Hot Glass is the typical thing you think of as being in a kiln, you know, with the blown glass and that kind of thing.

And it fire it.

It's really, really hot.

It's around 2200 degrees.

So what I do and fuze glass is called warm glass because my kiln only goes up to 1700 degrees Fahrenheit.

And so at warm glass is able to it doesn't it melts in terms of being like a really thick molasses type texture.

And so it can bend and move, but it doesn't become an actual liquid that you can blow in as in hot glass.

So in order to make things that have that have these kind of characteristics with texture, I have to make a claim mold.

And with the clay mold, then I can lay this on, melt it together, and then I can make things out of it that I want to make.

And so I was talking before about this idea that I wanted to get more texture and more overlap into my glass.

And this is sort of an early attempt at that refused glass trying to get things on top of each other and things to mold together.

And it's so much easier now with the class that I've taken.

But this is was my first attempt at trying to figure out how to make glass a little more interactive with the overlapping, with the different colors.

So this is warm glass, hot brass and cold glass.

Well, at the studios on High Gallery, we are the only artist owned and operated gallery in Charlotte North.

And every month we have a different show in the front of our gallery.

So I happen to be the member who is doing a show in September.

It's called From the Earth.

And the reason it's called From the Earth is because they had to pick a title a year ago.

They had no idea what it's going to do.

So I knew I wanted to experiment with some new things, but I didn't know how it was going to go.

So I thought that was generic enough to encompass.

What I really like to do is nature subjects and leaves and bamboo and things like that.

Having spent 18 years living in the tropics, I just love nature.

It's like when you live in a place where it's all around you, it becomes so much more of a part of your life.

So living in Ohio, I happen to live in a good neighborhood that has lots of trees, but it's still not the same.

And I'm always like trying to recreate pieces that have that that kind of jungly feel to it.

Well, this I'm hoping that's going to be my favorite piece when it gets done.

I really, really love Monstera Leaves.

So this is sort of like inspired by the first project that I made with Two Leaves, and I'm trying to see if I can get it to work.

Okay.

With five now glass, when you put it in a kiln and it melts it once to the level out, glass only wants to be this thick.

And unfortunately when you start, when you pile up glass, it will just flow all over the place and drip off the sides.

So it has to have dams.

So this these walls that I construct around the piece and I and I line so that they won't stick to the dams.

These walls will help the glass to continue to stay in the same framework in order to keep this this leaf, this part of the leaf flowing into that part of the leaf, you have to put a spacer in it of the clear glass.

So the clear glass will then hold it in place.

So I have to put in a whole lot of different pieces in order to to make the shape that I'm looking for.

And then there are all these gaps.

So how are these gaps going to fill in?

Some of them will fill in, okay, just by melting.

But I want to make sure that especially in gaps from one leaf to another, that there's enough of a line there that you can tell which leaf is on top and so on.

So basically what I need to do is to take the glass frit that I made in my grinder and and then I have to brush it into the cracks.

So as I brush it into the cracks, then it kind of fills in, in places that where I want it to blend.

It looks pretty obvious like now that I have this brought them to the blocks, but once it's all melted together, you don't really see it that much.

So I have to take it one last time, make sure there's nothing more I need to do, and then just close it and we'll find out in about 30 hours if it came out the way we wanted it to.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So far so good.

Well, it all came together pretty well.

Now I just need a piece of glass as a scraper.

I'll get some of this paper off, and then the next step is it's going in my sink to get a bath and get the rest of this off.

And then we'll see how it turned out.

It's kind of heavy.

Oh, now you can't see the top very well because it's in the shadows.

It will be a little bit brighter than that.

And this is a piece that's intended to be front lit.

So it under a spotlight.

I think it'll pop out pretty well.

I see people standing just kind of staring and they they look at how the pieces come together and they look at the negative space and the positive space.

And sometimes I've had art glass artists come in and they'll look at a really long, slender piece of glass, and they'll be like.

How did you got that?

I don't know.

You know?

And it's because I practice with a different kind of technique than they're probably using.

And part of it for me is not being a classically or academically trained artist.

I don't have the limitations of this is how it's supposed to be and this is what you can't do and this is what you can do.

So I'm always experimenting and playing around and then hopefully I can come up with some things that are are kind of unique in that way.

I hope that it encourages them somehow.

I hope that they look at it.

I hope that they feel a sense of, Oh, yeah, this is cool.

This is this is like life.

And this is something that that kind of makes my day feel a little bit better.

I really feel like it's a part of our humanity to be engaged with with nature.

It's part of who we are.

And when we live these these busy urban lives, we get disconnected from that.

So I really feel that through art, we can get a little bit better connected and begin to just appreciate a little bit more.

Of the world that we live in.

Next, we have back to back visits of two Maryland artists who use words and abstract film to weigh, you know, everyday subjects like immortality.

Have a look.

Love poem.

If by truth you mean hand, then yes, I hold to be self-evident and hold you in the highest k o to my o t and bait to my switch I crown you one trick pony to my one horse town.

I'm a poet, not because I have all these amazing things to say or all these amazing insights, but because I turn to language to explore uncertainty w my one stop shopping my space heater juke joint tourist trap my I am somebody who is in love with language and play within language and sound and rhythm and rhyme.

And for me, language itself could just carry me away like a flash flood.

I could get complete.

LEE Lost in the sounds and the rhythms and the rhymes that I love.

And so for me, when I talk about pressure and putting pressure on that language, it's a pressure on myself to ask my own pleasure to cohere into something meaningful for a reader and something meaningful for me.

Tell me you'll dismember this night forever.

You my punch drunk bag tar to my feather more than the sum of my life without poetry might be simpler, but it would be a lot less exciting.

A lot less surprising, a lot less fun for me.

And there would be a lot less of a sense of attention to the world around me if and then but if her than my fruit bat my Google.

You had me at.

No duh.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm sort of an introvert and I am I spend a lot and I like spending a lot of time thinking and making films.

It allows me to process experiences in my life or it's a way for me to articulate a feeling that I don't really know how to articulate through language memory.

August is a short film that I made documenting my grandmother when she was in a month long rehab center.

Her Alzheimer's was getting worse, and I didn't know how long she would live.

And so I was thinking a lot about mortality and what she felt, you know, getting older and the pain that she felt and the confusion she felt.

And I felt like I could really observe that through her facial expressions.

I'm really drawn to how light and texture and form help activate a memory.

Whenever I would travel, I would shoot various urban and rural landscapes and do a lot of field recordings of sound into these films.

Sort of became odes to a space or a memory and a moment in time, and it helped me process what I was feeling when I was navigating that space.

For me, it always starts with emotion and then I work through the emotion and start to think about what the emotion means conceptually, I like taking a chance and I like often like starting with one little interest and then just pushing it or experimenting or exploring and treating each film like.

Like a puzzle or a little like investigation.

This reminds me of the next artist.

We're going to meet a woman in Nevada who consciously pairs stones in her artwork to grapple with life in the forties.

Sounds like something I'm overdue for.

Meet Nicole King.

I find that my clients are a lot like me.

They feel empowered by a piece of jewelry.

They feel like they are stepping into their armor for the day.

They're stepping into their true selves.

It becomes a part of them and their story.

I like to pick up gemstone that I've fallen in love with and create a home for it.

I sometimes will sketch something out, but for the most part, I just really like to get my hands on the metal and do different shapes until I find a combination that just works with the stone.

So once I find the stone, I'll create the actual setting, whether that be the bezel or if I know I'm going to prong set it, that'll happen later.

I'll shape it and then I'll go over to my soldering bench and al-Sadr, the seam shot with a little piece of solder, put it in the pickle pot, clean it up, and then sort it out to its backplate, which is a sheet of silver.

Once I have that, I can start playing with silver wires around it, designing.

Sometimes I'm hammering pieces to incorporate, sometimes on melting pieces to incorporate the lot of cutting and filing and sanding and shaping.

Until I have a finished piece.

One of my favorite parts about making jewelry is the finishing of the piece.

I've finished the whole creation and I 15 at it and I'm sitting down to set the stone.

And even now to this day actually putting the stone in the piece of jewelry is like Christmas Day every single day because it comes alive in front of my eyes when I put that stone in.

So it's an incredibly satisfying feeling.

I just sit back and look at it and I don't know what else I should be doing with my life except for that, because it's such a satisfying feeling.

I really feel like I'm meant to be doing jewelry.

I like to call my jewelry talisman jewelry because I feel like the people that wear it are empowered and connected to the piece.

So there's a lot of artistry and storytelling that goes behind the piece.

Some of it's very visible and some of it's not so tangible.

It's more of something that you feel so this piece right here, it's called My Mind is My Temple, and it's figure of a woman's face with a kind of a Taj Mahal looking temple where her mind is.

And the day after I turn 39 and I had this idea come to me that I wanted to enter my forties being a little bit stronger in my mental game.

I feel like most of my life I've been aligned with the idea of my body as my temple, and I still think that's very important.

What we put in our body is what we get out of our body.

I was overlooking the power of our mind.

I just wanted to read, evaluate that and instead of my body is my temple, my mind is my temple is what struck me.

And immediately I had this vision of a woman woman's face with the temple of in her mind and and I knew I needed to make a piece like that so that I could have something tangible to remind me of that, to keep my mind on track when it starts to wander and to listen to the voices that are playing, listen to what output I'm putting in.

And so this is a very meaningful piece, especially this year of my life as I'm finishing up my thirties, I like to envision the person that is going to be wearing it.

Sometimes I like to think about their lifestyle, what they've experienced in life leading up to that point, what this piece might mean to them, their style.

And I just create a person.

I'm almost like a character in my head and I don't necessarily have a face to that character, but I have this idea of a person, and it's always really fascinating to see who falls in love with that finished piece because it's like a discovery for me.

Once that connection is made between the client and the piece I made, it's like I was channeling them all along and now I get to meet them.

It's a really cool experience, you know?

I always say, like on my business card, I'm a liaison between gemstones in their homes because that's how I feel.

I'm just a person that connects the people to these stones and creates the homes for them.

It's fun.

That's all the time we have for Gallery America.

Thank you so much for joining us as always.

You can see past episodes.

Just go to OETA dot TV slash Gallery America or the PBS app.

Also follow Gallery America Online for constant updates of art in Oklahoma on our Facebook account and on Instagram at OETA Gallery and don't sleep on the Gallery America podcast.

We got four episodes now.

The latest looks at how to listen to classical music.

How do you listen to classical music?

I don't know.

Talk to the conductor of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic to find out.

Thank you again for joining us.

We'll see you next time.

Until then, stay ready.

Oklahoma.

Stay arty.

Yeah, stay already.

Locust Grove Stroud.

Chickasha Weatherford.

Enid Hugo definitely Hugo.

Pink Pink?

Pink!

Pink, we're coming for you.

You better stay arty