Artist's Avenue: Alexis Pavlantos

Sophomore Alexis Pavlantos has a penchant for pendants and other forms of jewelry. She said her work tends to appeal to older women, but it’s not exclusively geared toward an older crowd. She considers it a compliment because older women have seen more exotic jewelry than she has in her lifetime. Pavlantos said she’s looking forward to heading to San Francisco next year, where she expects her art to flourish.

Daily Lobo: In the loosest sense of the word, what do you do?
Alexis Pavlantos: Mostly everything I do is used from found objects or recycled materials.

DL: Why’s that? Is it a desire to be eco-friendly, or something more abstract?
AP: That, which is kind of ironic because I am working with really toxic chemicals, but they are permanent toxic chemicals. Everything I make is very solid. It’s not just something that you can just throw away, but it’s somewhat recyclable.

DL: So from what you have shown me, these pieces of jewelry look a lot like plants. Is that the case?
AP: This is a weed. It’s not supposed to be very beautiful.

DL: How do you define a weed, though?
AP: I know! Exactly. Everywhere I went trying to figure out what the heck this plant was everyone was telling me these different things. I thought it was very beautiful, although everyone else thought it was a weed.

DL: So what goes into making jewelry out of a plant, then?
AP: I did a resin varnish on them (the pods of the plant). This is gold mesh. I wanted to make it more tangible. The pods are very flimsy, so they kind of are destructible. The rest is a super solid, but has movement in it.

DL: So how do you come into doing something like this?
AP: I have sculpted since I was 5. I wanted to make my sculptures more tangible. The clay I used was not very hard or firm, or, if you dropped it, it would break. So I wanted a way to preserve them. Actually, the first piece I ever did was a sculpture. Most of my pieces incorporate sculpting little intimate sculpture scenes.

DL: So we have only talked awhile, but already preserving your art work has come up twice. Could you explain that to me?
AP: Yeah, I definitely want a way to preserve it. That’s kind of a crazy concept to me that something I created will still have its own world (when I die). A piece of me will still live on. That’s also why I kind of starting doing bigger sculptures because they make a statement more. I just have this mind that — everything that I look at can become something. I don’t look at something and see what it is.

DL: Could you give me an example?
AP: Yeah, that weed. I didn’t look at it and think, “Oh that’s a cool weed.” I looked at it and was like, “Dude, I can make something out of that.” Some of my other recycled stuff is a lot of records, or my first piece was my grandpa’s 1910 Kodak camera. So, yeah, I look at something for what it could be not for what it is.

DL: Are those actual bits of a grasshopper in that piece in the pendant of the necklace?
AP: Yeah, I made him into what I thought he would look like only finding his legs and wings.

DL: That’s so fancy. How did you come up with that?
AP: It’s horribly strange finding bugs because I feel so bad. I like finding them because I feel they wouldn’t have left their parts — the parts wouldn’t have come across my way if they didn’t want me to find them. If I died, and I was a little bug, that’d be pretty tight to be around someone’s neck or to be a part of someone even though you’re lost and parts of your body are lost around the world. At least a few are preserved within a little space.

*Check out her work at
http://www.myspace.com/hangersbyalexis*