- [Kim] Growing up in Kalamazoo, arts culture has inspired Amelia Falk throughout her life.

Her home is also connected to Kalamazoo's history and is a piece of art itself.

Let's check it out.

Well, today I'm talking with Amelia Falk, who's the co-chair of the Jewelry Department at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art.

She's a jewelry lady.

She does photography.

What doesn't she do?

So thank you so much for talking with me here today, Amelia.

- Oh, thank you.

- Hey, listen, you know, I wanna talk about your house first.

Okay, we have to talk about your house, 'cause it's a little piece of art.

Tell me about it.

- Well, my house was designed and built in 1973 by Norm Carver, who was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright's.

He and my parents sat down and got together, decided what they wanted for a house.

And interestingly enough, Norm's idea for my house came from a grain silo.

(laughing) - [Kim] That's wild.

- Yeah, if you look at it from straight up, it looks like a giant X.

And then when you walk in, it's all, well, you can see behind me, redwood paneling.

And my mother kind of leaned over his shoulder and said, "Hey, you're not gonna make my kitchen that small."

(both chuckling) So if you know Frank Lloyd Wright homes and Norm Carver homes, they tend to have really small kitchens.

- Right, right, right, right.

- [Amelia] This one does not.

It has a kitchen that my parents used to throw a lot of parties.

And so they set it up so you could do it banquet style through the kitchen.

- [Kim] How wonderful.

- And I happened to get to know Norm down when I had a gallery space with a local painter down on the Kalamazoo Mall, and Norm happened to be our next door neighbor.

So I walked in one day and said, "Hi, Norm, I'm Amelia, you designed my parents' house."

And he looked at me kind of grumpily and said, "You look like a Falk."

(both chuckling) - That guy has an eye, right?

- Oh yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

- Tell me a little bit about what you do at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

It sounds like such an interesting job.

- So I am the co-chair for the Jewelry Department, which means that I'm kind of the one on the ground, but I do a lot of the general managerial things like cleaning and repairing equipment, you know, helping students that are down there.

And then I also teach in the photo department, so (laughs) I'm kind of running all over the place.

You get to know everyone, and I like the kind of intimate setting that we have down there, because the students do feel really comfortable and close with the instructors.

- And you were also described as meticulous, meticulous and creative artist.

How meticulous do you have to be if you're doing art or your photography?

- I question whether I should call myself a photographer or an installation art artist, because I have this tendency to put these super elaborate photo shoots together.

And I make the costumes a lot of times from pins, like, literally with safety pins.

So their whole costume will be something like a piece of fabric that I wrapped around them.

And then I do these, they're all based on kind of gods and goddesses and, you know, heroes and heroines, that kind of thing.

And so I do this kind of very elaborate, lots of fabric, lots of different types of props and things.

And then I will go in and add smoke or atmosphere in some way, create wind that wasn't there.

And so what I say, is that I'm putting this installation together and I photograph it to catalog it, and then the installation is over when the photo shoot is over.

But I have had many college advisors over the years that have done installation work, and they've always said that that would count as an installation.

- Oh, yeah, the amount of time and energy.

Where did you learn how to become an artist if you did learn it?

Some of the skills maybe?

- Oh, well, I traveled all over.

I hate to admit it, but I am the consummate artist in the fact that I wandered a bit in college.

(laughs) I started at Kalamazoo Valley, but then I wound up at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

I did a few years of study there, and then before coming back to Western to finish up.

And then I wound up out in Brisbane, Australia for my graduate degree.

And that's in photography with a minor in jewelry design.

And so that's where I learned.

- You do such original things with, you know, history, really, historical images, and you kind of incorporate it into jewelry.

Talk about some of your work like that.

- My jewelry work is based really on three principles.

And so the first one is the gods and goddesses.

I love all of my mythology.

And I was brought up, I lived in India when I was a kid, so my mother taught Indian religion.

And so I really loved the idea of being empowered.

You know, in the '70s we didn't have a lot of those kind of images around.

And so I would read these great comic books from India that explain all of their history and all of their mythology and things like that.

And so that was all really inspiring, because they had these female goddesses that would, you know, go and beat the bullheaded god and things like that.

And so I grew up with those stories.

So that runs kind of throughout all of my work, whether it's photography or jewelry or something else.

The second principle is zero waste.

You know, in jewelry we are making these things, we end up having these buckets full of waste products.

And my goal is to try to not waste anything and to keep using the metal until it gets smaller and smaller and finally I melt it down.

The third principle is these dyes.

And the dyes are historical dyes from the manufacturing industry.

They are around 100 years old.

These are all from companies that have gone out of business.

Some of these warehouses have been sitting empty for years.

And I'm talking, you know, some of them have been closed for almost 100 years now.

Luckily, a company that I work with down in Arizona has been going through and saving all of these millions of dyes from these production houses that have closed down.

If you're a tooling dye person at all, have any kind of history, we think of tooling dyes as car parts.

In the production days, there was male and female part, and they would stamp those together, and in between there would be a piece of metal that would then get smashed in and make this stamped, raised relief.

And so now in order to keep the cost down, he will take the male part, which is the hub, and he uses a 300 ton drop hammer to drive that hardened piece of steel down into a softer piece.

And then I get that piece of steel in the mail, and I use a 20 ton hydraulic press myself to push my bronze, brass, copper, silver down in to make that impression.

This is always the most fun part.

I think I have enough gas left.

(flame whooshing) So by annealing it, all I'm doing is I'm softening those internal molecules up so that they stretch out and relax.

It's like they take a gasp of air.

And I just need to get this to a dull red.

I can see that red coming up now.

And so that's now all those molecules are in, and they're nice and relaxed.

And so now this metal is going to get very soft, and that will allow me to put it into the dye and press it again.

So this just needs to cool down a little bit.

So, and then I need to put that in to pickle it, and that's kind of a funny word.

It's a really low-grade acid that clears the fire scale off of it.

And then I keep down here to keep it away from my cats.

(laughing) So once that's cool, I'll take it over to the hydraulic press and then press it.

So this one is actually made from a penny.

So I used 1982 and prior.

They made 'em in solid copper.

So they press really well.

And so this one, these are these dyes.

This is gonna sit down.

So that first one I showed, that is actually with the first press.

And I use something like this piece of beat up urethane, and I would put it in here and do the first press with that.

And so I can...

It's all hand cranked.

(machine clicking) Okay, and so I watch this little gauge here to make sure that I'm not giving it too much pressure.

And these are not the same kind of hydraulic presses that you see in all the YouTube videos.

(laughing) This is made for jewelry making, not for squishing crayons.

(laughing) Sometimes this happens where it splits off and cuts through a little bit, but most of the time it comes out.

And I will continue to press with some either pewter or aluminum, anything that gives it some, I've even pressed these with paper, sometimes with paper towel that's sitting around just to get any of the details.

Because the main issue with these is if you look closely, you can see that her nose is still pretty smashed in.

It's pretty flat.

So I'm gonna stick this down into where I see where the nose pattern is.

(hammer thudding) And I'm gonna give it a little bit of help.

(hammer thudding) If you pop that back up again, start to see that the nose is going to become more bulbous, the way that it's supposed to look.

And so I have to do that at the very end to pop the noses out and pop the lips out.

And that's because I'm only getting 1/2 of the original dye.

Back then, you know, everything was kind of made this way.

And they would use, this would be the female side of the hub, and then they have the actual hub, which is the male side.

And those two pieces would come down in a big machine and they would stamp together and they would instantly have this perfect, you know, perfect image because of the two halves coming together.

The problem is that the steel becomes prohibitively expensive at that point.

So when you've got these two pieces that fit together, you know, it just becomes too much for a small jeweler like me to be able to buy that.

And so they only give us the one half, the female half, and I have to use different things to press my metal down in there.

So it's very labor intensive.

That's why things are not made like this anymore.

You know, it's just too costly to pay people to be in a big studio or in a big factory and using all these things.

(bright gentle music) - Take me through image creation for you.

What are the steps when you're doing image creation?

- Oh, gosh.

Well, for me, it's very intuitive.

I think I kind of joke around and say, "Well, some people go and they put puzzles together before going to bed.

Go up to my studio and take all the pieces that I've pressed and I'll look at the stones that I have, and it becomes, you know, what is the stone saying to me?"

And they do, they talk to me a little bit and they tell me what will look good around them.

And because I do a lot of cutting apart these dyes, I'll cut pieces and parts out of them, I tend to go in then, and create these little stories.

So they'll either have one of my historical points of view, or they'll have some kind of odd sense of humor.

I have one "Alice in Wonderland" ring that has a pressed Cheshire cat on one side and a little white rabbit on the other side.

You know, my sense of humor comes through in those pieces as well.

So the whole creation process is very freeform, it's very flowing.

Just looking at things, I kind of piece them all together and make them into something that's really mine.

- You know, Amelia, you are just so fascinating to talk to.

I bet your students, I just know that they get so much out of you, you know?

And then you create, and sometimes we have these little happy accidents where everything all comes together.

And I think with your planning and your education and just your life, you're able to put those puzzle pieces together and just make beautiful art.

So I just wanted to thank you so much for talking with me here today.

I was so looking forward to it.

- Oh, thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

(bright gentle music) - [Narrator] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.