What's vision worth?

Erika, 23, is one of my housemates. Several nights a week, in a north-facing sunroom, where our five-person house stores its jumble of shoes, camping equipment, coconut water, washer and dryer, toilet paper, vacuum cleaner, water heater, the foyer to bathroom #2, you can hear her metal-tinkering from a desk in the northwest corner of the window-dominated hallway room. Dink, dink. When I moved in in December she said she's slowly giving more of herself to her jewelry-making. She came home one day with a couple of books from the San Francisco Public Library - one of her jobs, nude art modeling, takes her to the city frequently - on jewelry and metal-working, which were interesting to read at breakfast on random mornings; she left them on the communal kitchen table, where they lie today.

It's interesting, inspiring to witness the beginning of an artist at her craft. "To even have a set-up like I've got in the laundry room is YEARS in the making and literally a dream come true," she says. The path is a long one, begun three years ago with a metal arts workshop at Scintillant Studio in San Francisco, and accelerated a year ago with several classes at Sharon Art Studio on the northeast end of Sharon Grove in southern San Francisco.

Right now she's just trying to break even, to earn back enough money to balance what she spends on silver, copper, propane. Last week one afternoon she was working at recreating a piece, a ring, for an aunt, a practice she says is difficult; it's very hard, she says, to recreate something that she's made before, especially if it involves sautering. This afternoon she was dinking, with metal stamps, the name of her jewelry business, LUMEN, letter by letter, stamp by stamp, into a clean litmus paper-sized band of silver. Seventy percent of her time making jewelry, she laments, is spent sanding with successively finer-grained material, because, even though people might not notice, "It's important to me to make clean pieces."

She graduated from Cal-Berkeley with a degree in social welfare a couple of years ago. She works one night a week at the Fred Finch Youth Center in East Oakland as a counselor to troubled teenagers. I say that seems like it could be fun/interesting, and she ascents, nodding, but adds, "But it can be crazy, too." She doesn't know, or if she even wants, jewelry to be her primary source of income, but, as she says, "I just like doing it." And "I believe what I make is cool."

Just starting out, she has a Web site (Explanations, Ears, Fingers, Necks, Connections) and a business card, sells her stuff on the street during festivals like Art Murmur (held the first Friday of every month in Oakland), and has some connections with stores where she hopes to be selling her stuff soon. I visited her last Art Murmur booth on a freezing night on the Telegraph outskirts of downtown Oakland. Its charm set by buskers wailing hobo blues, the 'zine library at the ragtag gallery Rock Paper Scissors packed, an abundance of scarves and big glasses on the glassy/wine-eyed hipsters, bordering galleries full of avant-garde, colorful shape-dominated videos and laser printed-photography, inexplicable sculptures ("Is that a bike rack?").


Erika's characteristic pieces are rectangular tree-stamped copper earrings and thin, heart-shaped silver hoops, which she hung across a chunk of arching, thick piece of driftwood above a burgundy velvet on her table. The table held some earrings and rings, too. She was flanked by a bearded calm-eyed cast-off tie pouch entrepreneur, A Boy Named Coy, and somesort of graffiti situation. Bike LED lights cast their white-, blue- ish deceptively undetailed light on her earrings and rings, as she huddled in a orange down parka, exposing her art and herself to retail.

Her best-seller so far has been her heart earrings ($26 to $40 a pair), which she says are relatively boring to make - as she's made many - but are the only thing she can sell for what they're really worth. And, she says it's hard to determine what to charge people for her work. No doubt, just starting out it's hard to know what your art is worth. Regardless of the money, Erika says she's taking it slow, developing a living, intriguing, hopefully long-term relationship with her jewelry-making.

If you want some handmade jewelry, check out her Web site, here. As she's able, she does custom pieces, too.