Lisa Slovis Mandel will probably never tell anyone to “look but don’t touch.” That’s because the San Diego-based metalsmith is a functional artist who specifically encourages people to interact with her products on an intimate and tactile level.
“By incorporating movement and function in my art, the participant can have fun with the pieces by touching, playing and manipulating the arrangement of parts,” said Slovis Mandel, 32, who works out of her studio home and teaches metalsmithing and design at a local community college. “The utilitarian function in my pieces draws the viewer in and not only allows them, but often forces them to interact with it. Developed around characteristics of toys and ritual or ceremonial objects, these pieces can be used, manipulated and played with.”
Slovis Mandel’s art will be available locally over the Labor Day weekend, Sept. 2 to 4, at the Sausalito Art Festival (information is available at www.sausalitoartfestival.org). The festival will feature live music and more than 20,000 original works of contemporary and traditional art by artists from the United States and around the world. Slovis Mandel was one of 270 artists selected from a pool of 1,200.
Working with Jewish ritual objects, such as menorahs, mezuzahs, Kiddush cups, tzedakah boxes, candleholders, and dreidels, has been among the best ways for Slovis Mandel, raised in a Conservative Jewish home in Michigan, to maintain her primary artistic aim of being functional.
“I started in Judaica as an undergrad,” said Mandel, who received her bachelor’s of fine arts from the University of Wisconsin and master’s of fine arts from San Diego State University, “because I’d spend a month on a project and put my heart into it, so there was a real significance that the object would be used and not put on a shelf.”
For example, all her menorahs are totally modular, meaning the parts can be rearranged, and therefore are not necessarily used just at Chanukah. Slovis Mandel’s bronze pewter “Elliptical Modular Menorah” has eight smaller oblong pieces and a larger one for the shamash that can be grouped in a variety of configurations.
She makes all her jewelry in silver, but many of her ritual objects are done in pewter. “I really get excited about pewter,” said Slovis Mandel, who is married to a painter and has a 1-year-old son. “I like the color, and the metal is softer and moves differently. And pewter is less time intensive and more affordable for the consumer. People always joke about dreidels, ‘I made it out of clay.’ I say, ‘No, I made it out of pewter.'”
Slovis Mandel studied ceramics in high school, but quickly gravitated toward metal. “I came home when I was 16 and told my mother I wanted to make metal. I went out and bought copper foil and people started buying all the jewelry I made.” Later she won a summer scholarship to learn real metalwork.
The hardest part of being an artist, Slovis Mandel said, is maintaining her inspiration amid the demands to produce art for sale and exhibition. “When you work so hard, you lose your focus,” she said about her 30 hours a week as an artist, down by half since her pre-parent days. “You have to step back and grab your creativity again.”
She derives much of her inspiration from her father, who was a physician. “He always taught us to love what we do everyday and to follow what you want to do.”
Slovis Mandel’s lifelong participation in athletics also helped inspire the prominence that movement figures in her art. “All my pieces have a feeling of movement,” she said. “Not only a feeling that they move, but they do move.” She played volleyball and softball avidly until she became a mother last year. She also coached both sports for five years at the Maccabi youth level. She still gets her movement fix by chasing her toddler, Rollerblading and walking.
“Sports helped start me as an interactive artist,” said Slovis Mandel, who shows her work at retail and wholesale shows and in some 30 galleries across the country. “I am such a tactile person and love to touch things.”
She expects the same from the people who view and buy her work.