deserttalismans's Profile

Bio

Dawn Wilson-Enoch

I'm an artist who started out as an illustrator and gradually migrated into mythic/visionary painting and mixed-media drawings which I continue today. I've experimented widely with art dolls, ceremonial artifacts, costume, medicine bags, even tattoo design, but jewelry has become my primary medium. I hope to have a gallery website to refer you to soon, which will have the full extent of my work on view.

Although I lived my early life on the East Coast, I have always been drawn--called--to the desert, and the high desert of central New Mexico has been my home for nearly 13 years now. Here, the open horizons, vast skies, vivid colors and clear lines of the land are deeply nourishing to me, and suggest an aesthetic that I try to evoke through my work. I find jewelry is a wonderful medium for this in that it allows me to work with the forms, colors, textures, rhythms and lines that express this desert soul.

I've traveled widely through the Southwest and have always returned with stones, sand, clay, and plant and animal remnants...souvenirs of connection to the energy of a place and time. The larger stones eventually became a labyrinth in back of our house, and my studio is full of the rest, squirreled away in baskets and bowls. These, along with an extensive collection of beads, materials and elements, form the substance of my talismans.

My process is meditative and intuitive: I will often start with a single item and sit with it until it suggests something to me, perhaps whether it will be best as a ring or a necklace. Then I will gather materials that harmonize with it and draw from them as I work. Working on a piece is more like a dialogue than the superimposition of a design (and many designs have become something entirely different than their initial form!). I listen to the materials and will have a feeling of rightness when a piece comes together successfully. On the deepest level, I make pieces that look like they have been brought over from a timeless culture in the desert spirit world--a dreamtime landscape that is full of light and stone and a deep tranquility--and my intention is to have the pieces convey this feeling to those who wear them.

This is why I call my pieces "talismans": they're meant to be portable shrines, power objects that link one to desert places that are nourishing, whether by appearance or by literal use of materials from those locations. When they are worn they directly link you to a place of uncompromising wildness that acts as a powerful counterbalance to the superficial, hectic clutter of our human world.

Female, Born on August 22