Susan Freeman’s jewelry is made from semi-precious stones and whimsical bibelots
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By: Ilene Dube
Walking up the steps to Susan Freeman’s Cranbury art studio, one is greeted by two members of her Household Goddess series: Both "Shall I Pour the Chardonnay?" and "The Guests are Arriving" have heads made from the burners of an old electric stove and torsos made from well-worn cutting boards. "Shall I Pour" sports a bow tie made from a slice of a wooden spool and his arm is a wooden spoon. His mouth is made from toothy shells discovered on the beach and his eyeglasses, found in the street, look as if they’d been run over by a car.
"The Guests" is the more feminine of the two, with squiggles of wire hair spiking out from the burner head. Her lidded eyes were made from bottle caps folded over, her nose is a clothespin and her brooch is a trivet.
"She speaks first," says Ms. Freeman of the characters. Behind her window, one can see sheep grazing in an adjoining meadow. The artist trawls rummage sales and flea markets for the raw materials to make her artwork and jewelry. "Everything has to be old or used," she says. This year marks her eighth selling artwork and jewelry at Communiversity.
The room’s shelves are filled with boxes of shells from both the east and west coasts of Florida, and from Tybee Island, Ga. There are game pieces, fossils, chain links, beads, stamp collections and rocks. "I started making jewelry to use these things up, but it didn’t quite work that way," says Ms. Freeman, who has been making jewelry since the early 1990s. There are penny bottles and pieces from Scrabble, Dominoes, Checkers, Bingo, Monopoly and Clue. As a child she began collecting stamps and seashells, and from there it took off. She points to a piece of wood on the windowsill that looks like a sea monster. "I’ve always been fascinated by something that looks like something else," she says.
Rubber lizards, shark’s teeth, buttons, typewriter keys, brassiere and garter hardware they all find their way into her jewelry. A Scrabble tile turned into a hair stick juts out from the top of her upswept braid.
"I like to provide lighthearted things that make people smile," she says. "So many people look at my work and say, ‘How whimsical.’" Not uncoincidentally, her business is named Whimsy.
Like a true gemologist, Ms. Freeman has an eye for identifying stones. Looking at an old pin, she instantly recognizes it as eilat stone, mined only in Israel. A mix of azurite, turquoise and malachite, it is also known as King Solomon stone, and is a byproduct of copper mining. The beautiful blue-green color with its swirling patterns comes from the oxidization of copper, Ms. Freeman explains.
Ms. Freeman has relatives in Israel and has been visiting since her childhood, when she was given an eilat rock. Through collecting rocks in childhood, she learned to identify them. Her mother continues to bring eilat from her travels, and many of Ms. Freeman’s customers bring her buttons and items from their grandparents’ collections. She also gets new precious stones from various sources.
She sells her artwork and jewelry at the Cranbury Craft Show, the West Windsor Farmer’s Market, Hopewell Harvest Day, Cranbury Day, the West Windsor-Plainsboro High School Craft Fair, but "Communiversity is my best fair," she says. Her jewelry is also sold through the stores at the Arts Council of Princeton and McCarter Theatre, and her artwork is represented by Riverbank Arts in Stockton. She has three original prints in the Ellarslie Open at the Trenton City Museum, on view April 28 to June 7.
One of these prints, "Western Medicine Meets Eastern Medicine," a collograph, is biographical, she says. "I fought chronic disease for years and obediently took the pills the doctors gave me. It wasn’t working, so I tried Eastern medicine and noticed the interesting shapes of the package and magnets and herbs used in acupuncture." These all form grids of little circles of pill packs on the final print.
She starts the process by making a collage of textured material, inks it over, then runs it through the press with wet paper. "A Successful Day at the Mall" is another collograph made from the little plastic tags that fasten labels to clothing. She covered this with foil, then added watercolor and chine collé hand-made paper attached with wheat paste and ran it through the press.
Since childhood, Ms. Freeman has enjoyed making things, from painting rocks to carving linoleum to making notecards. Around her house are sophisticated sculptures she made as far back as junior high, such as "Automaton," a figure made from gears, watch parts, wire and a metal box; a lamp from a radio wave measuring device; a money tree, using the change from her father’s pockets after he returned from foreign countries; and a table top made from an old printer’s drawer, given as a gift to her mother in the summer of 1980, filled with family photos and keys.
At one point Ms. Freeman found herself the lucky recipient of sample moldings from a frame shop that was going out of business, and many of her assemblages incorporate these, such as a wall hanging of these chevrons interlaced with beads, shells, spools and keys. "I don’t use glue," she says. "I like to make everything fit."
She went to Cornell to major in art and majored in printmaking and photographing, studying sculpture, as well. She teaches printmaking at Artworks and jewelry making and scrap booking in the Cranbury After School Program. She began quilt making in junior high, and incorporates fabrics from clothing, bedspreads and curtains from her entire family going back to her grandparents. Assembling these with a pre-1930 foot-treadle sewing machine, Ms. Freeman says they tell a personal history.
She also appliqués fish bags, which will be available at Communiversity. "Whatever fits in the car," she says, " jewelry, original prints, photographs, drawings and pastels, fish bags and wind chimes."
Among her jewelry, there are bracelets made from a purple moukaite stone with Swarovski crystals; rose quarts with blue lace agate, green aventurine, peach aventurine and aragonite; freshwater pearls, amethyst, agate and fire opal; and necklaces from chalk green turquoise, sterling and glass; fire opal, lapis and tree agate; and rainbow moonstone and amethyst.
Last year, Ms. Freeman went to the Philadelphia Flower Show wearing a pair of earrings she’d made with a flower coming out of a stone vase. The flower itself was an antique cut glass flower, and a woman at the show approached her and asked, "Where did you buy those earrings?" When Ms. Freeman said she made the earrings, the woman offered to buy them on the spot and walked off wearing them. "It paid for my visit to the flower show and lunch," says Ms. Freeman.
Susan Freeman and Whimsy Design will be at spot number 42 on Nassau Street at Communiversity, selling semi-precious and found object jewelry, original prints, photographs, fish bags and "whatever fits in the car." For information about Whimsy Design or to make an appointment, e-mail [email protected]

