Vintage jewelry, glass, semi-precious stones, shells, ceramics, old fabric and other materials recycled into one-of-a-kind creations.
I was born in Peru and as far as I can remember, I always liked to draw and create things with my hands. When I was seventeen, I came to the USA and after two years at a liberal arts schools, where I studied art, art history and music, I decided to go to architecture school at Carnegie Mellon U., a school with a strong emphasis on design. After graduation, I worked in Pittsburgh for two years, and then decided to move to New York City to pursue a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation at Columbia U. By that time, preservation and all it implies had become a way of life rather than a career for me. I worked as a preservation architect in NYC for 14 years and then, lured by my love of travel and foreign cultures, switched careers and became a Program Director at the World Monuments Fund, a private non-for-profit that supports preservation of cultural heritage around the world. After 16 years at WMF I started my own Preservation Consulting practice: Norma Barbacci Preservation Consultants LLC. Although architecture and preservation work has always been fulfilling, I started making jewelry in order to have a more immediate outlet for my creativity.
As a preservationist, I believe in giving new life to old buildings. As a maker, I believe that discarded materials can and should be recycled into attractive and useful new resources. Broken car glass, single-use plastic bags, incomplete pieces of vintage jewelry, shells, driftwood, cracked ceramics and most kinds of discarded materials inspire me. As an architect, I was trained to imagine buildings and spaces and convey my designs on paper for someone else to build. As a maker, I can not only imagine something but also produce it myself. That inspires me and gives me huge satisfaction.
Recycling. Reusing. Rehabilitating. Renewing. Repurposing. Readapting. Recreating. Reconstructing. Basically anything that means bringing life back to that which has been rendered useless by a human action or a natural agent. Creating a beautiful and useful object from trash, a trash-formation if you will, makes my world go around.
