from Wrightsville Beach Magazine February 2007 "Pushing Boundaries" by Marimar McNaughton A solitary female form skirts the shoreline of Masonboro Island. On this unblemished outpost inhabited by wild marine life, Melissa Manley — conceptual artist, metalsmith, jeweler, potter, printmaker, painter — straddles two worlds, one fixed, one fluid. Along the littoral, that ephemeral edge that divides the sea from the land, Manley found a shrine among the shell beds, a fount of natural history in the flotsam and the jetsam fetched up by the ocean. On this island, unencumbered by time, she discovered her muse, and the inspiration for her master’s thesis in art. During a three-year odyssey, she commuted from home port in Wilmington to Greenville, where she attended graduate school at East Carolina University on weekdays. On weekends, she raced back to immerse herself in Masonboro’s charms. “My very best friend bought herself what I like to call her mid-life-crisis-Boston Whaler,” Manley said. The women who named themselves the “cowgirls of Whiskey Creek” took their children, including Manley’s daughter, Meredith, now 11, to the island every day that first summer in 2003. “We’d go out there for hours on end, and I’d wander. There was a section, a huge swamp of shell fragments, with thousands and thousands and thousands of shells, as far as I could see.” Walking one afternoon, it suddenly dawned on her that every shell once held a living creature. “I became enthralled with the whole concept of those cycles, and the water, and everything.” She was on the brink of surrendering to a calling to create. “I think at that point, it was about life on the edge of two things that connect. So I kind of became obsessed with edges, the water and the beach and the ambiguity,” Manley says. With a portfolio of prints and paintings from her undergraduate degree from UNCW, buoyed by the sacrifice of family and a swell of enthusiasm from a host of well-known Wilmington artists, such as potter Hiroshi Sueyoshi, sculptor Michael Van Hout, jeweler Tim Brown and painter Mary Ellen Golden, Manley applied to ECU and was accepted. Driving to and from Greenville, along the way she explored the edges of roads, medians, plant life, pine trees and clouds. Nudging those edges — of the land and the water, of the real and the temporal, of the fixed and the fluid — pushed Manley’s pencil over the pages of her sketchbook, nudging designs into three dimensions. The metamorphosis is evident now in touchable, wearable shell-encrusted jewelry, sea-inspired vessels and assemblages cobbled from the ocean’s detritus. The juxtaposition of edges is mapped onto the edges of frames, chased into the edges of vessels, fashioned into the edges of bracelets, brooches and pendants. Combining those edges with a passion for arcane art, iconography, Egyptology and the Renaissance, Manley developed a recognizable idiom. In May 2006, she earned a Master of Arts degree. In June, she moved into Independent Art Company where she creates and teaches from a shared space on Ninth Street in Wilmington. Inside the rehabilitated metal warehouse, her work benches are lined with pinchers, crimpers, hammers and saws for cutting, bending and shaping raw material into polished pieces. Her bookshelves are lined with volumes of art books, historic texts and ephemera. In October 2006, she mounted her first one-woman show, Water Spirits, in Independent’s lobby. One silver bracelet is contoured to fit a slender wrist. The crest of the bracelet is sculpted like the motion of wind-lapped waves. The surface is stamped and drilled to resemble sea foam that drifts across the flat surface of the bracelet’s cuff. Tiny shells and bits of seaweed from Manley’s sea-bed plunders are pressed between Plexiglas and inset into the silver surround like jewels. Hauling out myths from cultures past, Manley treads on the edges of the earliest known repositories of collected artifacts. “My second year of grad school I had to do a presentation and talk about something that influenced my work,” she says. She chose wunderkammer. Translated from German, the Renaissance word means “cabinet of curiosity.” In recreating wunderkammer for a new audience, Manley laughingly calls herself a “remnantologist,” creating vignettes, “little snapshots,” culled from her sea chest. Most of her treasures are arranged like a compass, pointing to where she has been collecting, archiving, creating. Contents, like clues, include mounted maps of the Cape Fear River, shelves for displaying driftwood, fish bones, crab claws, feathers. Some are composed with verses gleaned from years of foraging history books, literature and song lyrics. Her vessels, whether they are hammered from copper using methods handed down from Colonial metalsmiths, or crafted from steel wire and animal gut, resemble the wet drapery technique of the ancient Greeks to imply the movement of swirling water. In so many ways, Manley’s work tugs at the edges of the mind. Like a hydraulic whirlpool, the vortex of her spell pulls the viewer in like an intoxicating undertow. Manley says she is fortunate to have studied with professors who were not shy, who encouraged their students to articulate their philosophies. Fearlessly, she smudges the line between gestation and creation. “This is me playing,” Manley says about a grouping of funky wristlets. “I wanted to make a series of bracelets for all the Nereides – the 50 daughters of Nereus.” Inspired by the mythical Mediterranean Sea nymphs, who dwell with their father at the bottom of the briny deep, Manley crafted 20 bracelets from disparate organic and synthetic materials; one from found beach glass and copper, another a tiny conch shell fragment on reclaimed wire. Some bands are made from monofilament net, line or aquarium tubing embellished with plastic vegetation or gelatinous lures. Her signature pieces read like a journal entry encapsulating the journey from sea sprite to artist. “Once I absorbed enough stuff — and thought about stuff — I then just made stuff.” |
Bon Voyage *WEB EXTRA* by Marimar McNaughton
Melissa Manley embarked on an art voyage that began when her family moved from Norfolk, Virginia, to Wilmington when she was 12. “When I was in middle school, I was all about the Crystal Pier,” Manley remembers, painting a picture of crusty old men selling bait, sunburned girls squished into vinyl booths, lunching on cheeseburgers and fries, baking like hot potatoes in the sun. “I wanted to be a surfer chick in the worst way,” Manley says, trying for three years before tossing in the towel. “I was tenacious,” she says. In high school, Manley got hooked on history, obsessing over Egyptian studies. She thought she wanted to pursue Egyptology in college. After spending a month in the foreign land she realized she was really a home girl, and literally returned to the drawing board, attending the University of North Carolina in Wilmington (UNCW). She studied art history with John Myers and printmaking with Donald Furst and Ann Conner (both have work currently exhibited at Cameron Art Museum, through April 1). “You’re going to struggle,” Conner told her. “It’s not going to be easy. You might want to get that history degree.” Those early loves, summer days at the beach, and a passion for ancient cultures trickled into her art work as a steady stream of inspiration, from undergraduate studies, to graduate school and back to home, to Wilmington. After UNCW, Manley worked for jeweler Tim Brown at his shop, T. S. Brown Jewelry, at the Cotton Exchange. “Melissa was always really artsy-craftsy,” Brown says. But she had no jewelry experience until Brown introduced her to metals and gemstones and the challenges of crafting wearable art. “It’s not like a painting you can hang on your wall,” Brown says. “Somebody has to wear it. Will the stone stay in the mounting? Is the metal strong enough to hold up?” Brown taught Manley to solder, helping her overcome her fear of the fire. “I remember when she was afraid to hold the torch. I’m really proud of her skills. She’s just gone so far with it. She’s a master now. Her abilities have gone way beyond mine,” Brown says. While working for Brown, he wrote a letter of recommendation for Manley’s scholarship application to Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee to study with Keith LoBue. The LoBue connection would prove to be a major turning point for Manely, who was mentored after UNCW by Brown and other local artists, notably Mary Ellen Golden, Hiroshi Sueyoshi and Michael Van Hout. When she returned from Arrowmont, Manley set up a booth at Wilmington’s City Market for the summer and was adopted away by Golden to work in the Golden Gallery, where she has been a surrogate member of that multi-talented family for more than 10 years. “Mary Ellen has a very nurturing spirit. She told me one day that I was going to lead a watercolor class at her house.” It was Manley’s first lesson in teaching. With Hiroshi, Manley studied ceramics for four years at the Community Arts Center. “Hiroshi has such a gentle demeanor. He didn’t push me … just facilitated in his Zen-like way.” The potter introduced her to wire work with clay and was the first to suggest that she make jewelry. Around the same time, Michael Van Hout gave her a pair of tin snips and a piece of sheet metal. That was all the wind she needed to fill her sails. Manley now holds a Master in Art degree from East Carolina University, the only accredited art school in North Carolina. In Greenville, she studied under Robert Ebendorf, considered the guru of the studio jewelry movement in America and the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Art at ECU. “The person who really twisted her nose and said it’s time for you to make this commitment was Keith LoBue,” Ebendorf says. “When she met Keith, he was doing jewelry and images that dealt with lost and found materials. He knows me very well. He said, ‘Bob is right there, and you should really go and meet him.’” Manley arrived at ECU with strong ideas, Ebendorf says. She was eager to learn. “There was no turning back. She was a wet sponge,” he says. Ebendorf recognized Manley’s maturity, a woman with a family, juggling much more on her plate than the other students. “We were gifted by her presence, even though it was hard for her, coming back and forth,” he says. For her part, Manley found a support system at ECU, a nurturing network of graduate peers. “I made tremendous sacrifices,” Manley says. “My family had to sacrifice alongside me,” she says. At 38 years old, and divorced, she moved back home with her parents with her daughter, then 8, to go to graduate school. “I was so utterly compelled,” Manley says, calling the move ‘a parachute maneuver.’ “You just have to jump and hope that the parachute will open,” she says, adding, “It’s not one jump but a lot of little jumps.” “I knew what this commitment meant for her, to go home on Friday evenings and to become a mother, and at the same time try to have a social life, then turn around and leave again,” Ebendorf says. “She had a real challenge. But that also speaks about her fiber, her tenacity.” When her three years were over, he shipped her back to Wilmington. “I said, look girl, you’ve got such a footprint there,” he recalls. “That’s a calling card. You’re ready to hit the pavement. So much of the body of her work came right off the beach there, and the topography and the coastline.” After grad school, Manley languished in the doldrums, relentlessly questioning, and answering, herself. “Do I get the square job?” she wondered at times. “It’s such an imbalance,” she says. “When you’re in school, you’re getting in shows; professors are pumping you to ‘do it.’ When you’re searching for jobs, your inner dialogue is, ‘I’m nobody and I was feeling like somebody.’ It’s scary when you’re an artist, putting yourself out there to be judged. We’re a creative species. If we’re stuck in the jungle out of a crashed airplane, we’re going to find things to wear, make things to eat, build places to live. For me, I doubt there are any alternatives. I can’t see myself doing anything else beside art.” |