Vase by Michele Oka Doner

Nature has long been an inspiration for artists, but perhaps none before Michelle Oka Doner has approached the wild divine with an eye that is at once academic and alchemical. Remember being a child and putting into our pocket interesting stones, a scraggly piece of lichen and perhaps a weathered twig whose twisted shape evokes something that we just can't put our finger on. This is the world of Michele Oka Doner.

Michele Oka Doner is an artist, a sculptress, a jeweler, some may even say she is a designer. She takes bits of the natural world, twists them, arranges them and magically casts them in precious metals. The result looks like what Mother Nature would do if she were a metalsmith. A clump of seaweed becomes a pair of silver salad servers, the skeleton of a shrub becomes a "burning bush" of a candelabra, a cluster of thorns or the carcass of a sea urchin or an orchid receives the Midas touch and becomes jewelry. Her work ranges from the personal (body adornment) to the public (a magnificent floor installation in the Miami Airport consisting of cast metal pieces imbedded into a black terrazzo floor.)

A monograph on her work titled Michele Oka Doner: Natural Seduction written by the jewelry and craft historians Suzanne Ramljak, Arthur Danto, and Mitchell Wolfson will soon be available. Her work was also recently showcased in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's Trienniale exhibition and can be seen in the catalog titled Inside Design Now. Michele Oka Doner is an internationally acclaimed artist. Her work is in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Design Museum-Smithsonian Institution, New York.

An artist’s studio is a magical place. Oka Doner's is no exception. Filled with natural history specimens, bits of coral, branches covered with berries, seed pods - things simultaneously eerie and seductive, scientific and poetic. The huge New York loft is punctuated with Bugatti furniture and mid-century modern classics from Florence Knoll and George Nelson, and walls are filled solid with books of poetry, philosophy and natural history.

She is also well known for her monumental works in public places, including "Radiant Site," a 150 foot long wall composed of 11,000 gold lustre tiles at the Herald Square Subway complex in New York; " Codex Sacramento" at the Sacramento Central Library; and "A Walk on the Beach", the celebrated 22,000 sq. foot floor of Concourse A, Miami International Airport. Oka Doner has participated in a number of distinguished exhibitions, among them Formed by Fire, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Design Resource, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York; Industrial Elegance, Guggenheim Museum, New York; Reperti, National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janerio, Brazil; and Architecture and Art, International Contemporary Art Fair, Yokohama, Japan.

Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, the Washington Post , Metropolis Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Oka Doner is the recipient of a number of awards and grants: The Kress Foundation, The New York State Council for the Arts, and the Lydia Winston Malbin Prize at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. For more information go to www.MicheleOkaDoner.com .