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Jewelry maker Kristin Evensen at work in her Orangeville studio. At right is a pair of her polymer clay, bead and deerskin earrings.
MEET THE MAKER
Kristin Evensen This Orangeville artist strings together her Anishnaabe heritage and contemporary design in every pair of earrings she makes. BY JANICE QUIRT
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ristin Evensen vividly recalls watching her grandmother, surrounded by canisters of brightly coloured beads, as her flying fingers nimbly decorated handcrafted moccasins. Her grandmother’s quilts, dreamcatchers, medicine bags and birch bark art are other early memories. “I’ve always been an artist,” says Kristin. “My life has been surrounded by art and design, as well as by my Indigenous heritage.” Born in Toronto, Kristin moved with her family to Christian Island, part of Beausoleil First Nation, when she was three, then to Orangeville at age nine. After living in Toronto for a few years, she and her husband bought a house in Orangeville where they now live with their three young children. Kristin studied design at George Brown College where she experimented with a variety of media. Her first foray into her own design business involved knitting patterns, but when she started beading two years ago on a journey to deepen her connection with her Anishnaabe heritage, she found her primary medium. She watched YouTube tutorials on tradition al beadwork practices and began to create her own designs. Six months later she launched her Etsy shop, K. Frances Beadwork, which specializes in earrings. Though her technique is influenced by cultural traditions, her aesthetic is exuberantly contemporary.
Kristin’s process begins with a colour palette influenced by nature, fashion and favourite works of art. For this year’s spring collection, for example, she envisioned soft, light hues inspired by natural stone. Kristin uses polymer clay – laced with a subtle metallic shimmer to add depth and light-catching visual texture – to fashion central cabochons, the unfaceted, polished “gemstones” that anchor her earrings. She bakes the cabochon at 275F (135C) and sands it with wet, fine-grained automotive sandpaper before polishing it with a Dremel tool. The cabochon is then fixed to a felt backing that also serves as the backing for the glass seed beads she stitches into place around the polished stone. She then glues all this to a sustainably sourced deer-hide backing. Kristin has found an online Indigenous merchant who sells scrap bags of deer hide left over from other artists’ larger projects, as well as smaller pieces of hide purchased from hunters who can’t use it all. Main taining this continuum with traditional practices and materials is just one way she is building a business that is both authentic and highly contemporary. C O N T I N U E D O N N E X T PA G E
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