Turlock artist pounds the ugly out of old metal to make jewelry

The diamond in the rough. The pearl in the oyster. The earrings in the old sheet of galvanized steel roofing.

Since she was a child living in Hilmar, Anne Kapor-Aleson has had a gift for seeing beautiful possibilities hidden within the plain. She and a brother would mold clay into beads and figurines. She wanted a dollhouse, so she fashioned one from cardboard.

Her parents are artistic – “They did pottery and painting; they dabbled in everything” – and her grandfather worked in demolition and was a “saver.” He held onto all sorts of scrap material, some of which her parents used when they launched their Pageo (the name comes from their names, Patty and George) Lavender Farm on Golf Road in Turlock.

“They started it from scratch,” Kapor-Aleson said. “The amount of creativity that goes into that is insane.”

She was raised with an appreciation for repurposing materials. “It was always fun to challenge yourself to see what you could make out of what you have,” she said this week, working in her studio in the 1913 house she shares with her husband, Matt, and their cats, Wicket and Thor. The studio itself is a repurposed room that used to be the home’s garage. Thick wood planks cover what once was an oil pit.

As young Anne grew older, her work became more sophisticated – intricate beadwork and jewelry making – but her love of using reclaimed materials remained.

“I would see jewelry and I didn’t quite like it,” she said. “I always wanted to tweak it, so I figured I could make my own, so why not?”

Kapor-Aleson started experimenting with soldering and cutting pieces of found metal – brass, copper, her grandfather’s scraps of corrugated steel roofing – into various shapes she calls modern, geometric, weird and organic.

Her “hobby gone wild,” as she refers to it on her website, evolved into a business, Birch: Handcrafted Wearables. She sells her handcrafted earrings, bracelets, necklaces and more online, in a handful of shops and by traveling to shows.

Locally, her works are carried at The Chartreuse Muse in Modesto and Digs in Turlock. And she’s busy these days preparing for the Patchwork Show Modern Makers Festival coming June 4 to Jack London Square in Oakland.

She describes her style as minimalist and said, “A common compliment I get is that (my pieces) are very dainty and delicate and different, which I appreciate.”

In her studio Monday, Kapor-Aleson was turning a piece of scrap brass into a verse pendant. After using tin snips to cut the metal into an oblong, she smoothed its edges with a grinder. She then “fire-painted” the metal with a torch to bring out a rainbowlike patina.

After drilling a small hole to string it on a necklace chain, Kapor-Aleson finished the piece by hand-engraving both sides in beautiful cursive with a passage from the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. …”

Her choice of metal for a jewelry piece “depends on what I’m making and what ideas I have. And also if I’m OK with it tarnishing a little bit. If I’m not, and it’s a smaller piece, obviously I like gold and silver,” Kapor-Aleson said. “But if it’s something I want to fire-paint or have a certain sheen or look to it, brass is fun.

“The galvanized metal roofing can be hard on my hands and has toxic coating on it, so I can’t heat it up and get it softer. … So that’s probably most difficult to work with. I love how it looks, though, so it’s worth the sacrifice. When you sand it and polish it, it gets this really cool patina, really pretty, interesting colors.”

Ideas come to Kapor-Aleson on their own schedule, and sketch paper tacked on the wall above a workshop table bears dozens of them. Her favorites tend to come just as she’s falling asleep. “I’ll get a vision of something in my mind’s eye. Most of the time I remember it the next day, sometimes I don’t.”

Kapor-Aleson has a bachelor’s degree in social science with a concentration in history. She planned to teach, and still figures she may become an art teacher. She said she’s also always been interested in counseling.

“Art is a pretty therapeutic channel,” she said. “One of the things that kind of threw me back into doing this full time was I kind of struggled with a depression period in my life, and so doing this … it’s just very cathartic.”

So, for now, and the indefinite future, it’s all about her Birch business. Though a busy workday can stretch from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. when she’s preparing to head to a show, Kapor-Aleson said she enjoys making her own schedule.

She also enjoys the look of surprise on a customer’s face when she informs someone that this pendant or those earrings once were galvanized roofing or some other piece of reclaimed metal.

“I had some old car wash coins,” she continued, “and it was fun to hammer those out and heat them up, and then I did hand etching on them, so they’re like a modern version of dog tags.

“I found some old – and I even think I’m maybe crazy for doing this – some old rusty cans in Arizona. I think the rust makes a really interesting texture, patina. So I’m going to be using those soon. I’m trying to think of something good for those.

“It’s fun to challenge yourself to make something pretty out of junk.”

This story was originally published May 19, 2016 at 4:07 PM with the headline "Turlock artist pounds the ugly out of old metal to make jewelry."