Early next month, West Vancouver jewelry designer Tania Gleave will make her shortest commute of the year.
It's just a quick walk from her Ambleside home down to Argyle Avenue where she will join the dozens of other artists and artisans juried into the Art Market at this year's Harmony Arts Festival. Gleave will have a booth set up during both weekends of the festival - Aug. 1 to 4 and Aug. 8 to 10.
"It's so great to do the Harmony Arts Festival because for all other shows I do, it's trains, planes and automobiles," she says, recalling some of the far-flung locales in which she's exhibited her designs. For six years, Gleave co-ran the Lemon Park jewelry company with her sister Penny. Two years ago, the artist struck out on her own and created a whole new jewelry collection under her own label. She does the bulk of the production work in her Lower Lonsdale studio, but also works out of the Granville Island gallery space she operates with her artist husband Peter Kiss. Gleave says it's the size and the material that really sets her jewelry apart from the rest.
"The scale tends to be quite confident, it's bold," she says of her signature look, adding, "I consistently use in my collection leather, bone, horn and ebony."
When working in leather, she collaborates with her Granville Island studio neighbour Monika Sadryna, a leather artist who happily lends her expert hand in exchange for a carved wooden handbag handle or two.
Gleave sources her material from all over the world and visits Bali, Indonesia once or twice a year to meet with a carver and discuss whether or not her sketches can be realized in ebony.
"I like to be there for that so that we can iron out any challenges that come up," she says. She has also travelled to the Ratnapura district of Sri Lanka - a region famed for its gem mining. "The mines are tiny. They're not anything like what we would imagine a mine here in Canada being," Gleave says, remembering a time when she descended a rickety bamboo ladder into a small hole in the ground. "You climb down the ladder and have a little head lamp on and then you crawl horizontally. It's pretty rustic."
She watched miners pull raw tourmalines and spinels out of the ground and, in seeing the process, developed a stronger connection to the products she uses in her jewelry. In addition to her signature leather, bone,horn and ebony designs, Gleave will also bring to the Harmony Arts Festival some aluminum pieces from her I Heart TO collection, designed in collaboration with Toronto fashion designer Anu Raina and showcased on the runway at Toronto Fashion Week in March.
Much of Gleave's inspiration comes from the manufacturing process.
"You get more ideas in the doing. The more you do, the more ideas you get because one thing leads to another."
But other ideas come from unlikely places. For example, Gleave's ebony chains may look simple upon first glance, but the links are actually modelled after castoff bits of anchor and ship chain she scavenged from the North Vancouver waterfront.
Whatever the piece, all of Gleave's designs are conversation starters.
"The pieces all have a story. I can explain where all of the materials have come from and how they got to be in the shape and form that they are," she says. "And I think in today's world that means a lot because there's so much manufacturing out there that I think it really means a lot to my clientele that they have a piece that has really touched the hands of an artist."
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The Harmony Arts Festival Art Market takes place along West Vancouver's Argyle Avenue between 14th and 17th streets on Friday, Aug. 1, 2-9 p.m.; Saturday, Aug. 2 to Monday, Aug. 4, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday, Aug. 8, 2-9 p.m.; Saturday, Aug. 9 and Sunday, Aug. 10, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. See harmonyarts.ca/artmarket for a full list of participating photographers, jewelers, textile artists, glass workers, painters, woodworkers, potters, metal artists and sculptors.
