Trash is treasure for this jewelry maker and sculptor

“Oooh, look astatine this trash!”

Alicia Piller was giddily flitting astir her Inglewood live-work workplace holding up resin-coated balls of detritus, showing disconnected tiny fossil fragments, and pulling retired integrative trays filled with random thingamajigs that had been organized by color.

The assortment is each portion of her eclectic jewelry-making arsenal. She clusters recycled textiles, recovered items, donated castoffs and gemstones to make handmade wearable creation that she describes arsenic “science bohemian.”

In this series, we item autarkic makers and artists, from glassblowers to fibre artists, who are creating archetypal products successful and astir Los Angeles.

Piller juxtaposes opals, garnets and pearls with little accepted materials specified arsenic tile fragments, snakeskin, bits of lava from a travel to Iceland, and slug casings, each bound unneurotic with strips of leather oregon vinyl. Lately, she’s been moving with 3-D printed discarded that her friends, a brace of costume-based show artists, started delivering to her successful elephantine garbage bags.

“I americium ever reasoning astir immoderate facet of recycling,” she said, “seeing the worth successful these things that we deem ‘trash.’”

One partition of her workplace is lined with metallic racks stacked with bins and boxes labeled “clay,” “metal” and “scraps.” The country is cluttered, yet curated.

“There’s a small spot of hoarding mentality,” Piller laughed, “but I use it!”

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1. Necklaces featuring seashells, gemstones and recycled printed plastic. 2. Alicia Piller displays her handmade ring. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

From her “controlled chaos” travel intricate, ornate, one-of-a-kind necklaces, earrings, brooches and rings. While Etsy is her main retail hub, she antecedently sold her wearables astatine L.A.’s Craft Contemporary depository and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She’s besides provided flair for the likes of Phylicia Rashad, Jill Scott and Ciara.

Her creations springiness nods to nature, astatine times skew extraterrestrial, and person Afro-futuristic undertones. One pendant evokes the oversea with its swirl of mother-of-pearl, spiral seashells and rivulets of airy grey leather arranged supra a portion of bleached coral. A crystal-festooned collar necklace calls to caput a brace of Blue Morpho butterfly wings. And a jasper-studded pin resembles a Ghanaian disguise astatine archetypal glance.

The undulating layers and microcosms that marque up her jewelry’s signature “biomorphic” look widen into her good creation practice, arsenic well.

Piller received an MFA from Cal Arts and present teaches sculpture arsenic an adjunct prof astatine UCLA and UC Irvine. Her maximalist mixed-media artwork has shown astatine Track 16 (the L.A. assemblage that represents her), arsenic good arsenic institutions crossed Southern California, including the Brick and the Orange County Museum of Art. Both the Hammer Museum and the California African American Museum person her pieces successful their imperishable collections. Next summer, she’ll unveil a caller monument arsenic portion of West Hollywood’s Art connected the Outside nationalist creation program.

In her studio, aggregate towering sculptures are ensconced successful cardboard and bubble wrap, portion others — works successful advancement — beryllium connected plinths, thin against walls, oregon bent from the ceiling. There’s a stark opposition betwixt these 9-foot-tall pieces and her smallest makes, a brace of one-inch station earrings. But toggling from the monolithic to the infinitesimal comes people to her.

Alicia Piller stands for a representation successful her studio.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s astir the microscopic and the macro,” she explained. “I similar being capable to spot the tiniest detail, past letting it grow retired into the cosmos. I’m reasoning astir those 2 scales perpetually and astir wherever we acceptable betwixt those scales.”

While she addresses specified weighty topics arsenic constabulary brutality and clime disasters successful her large-scale works, making wearables provides comfort.

“The jewelry is overmuch much free-form and amusive versus the much superior worldly that feels dense to me,” she said. “It’s not ever afloat of activism and each these ideas astir humanity and the world. It’s much of a joyous, little stressful task.”

She added, “I besides conscionable emotion to adorn myself successful the things that I make.”

This has been existent since childhood.

During the workplace tour, the creator pulled retired a portion of brass ligament bent to spell retired her name, a keepsake from erstwhile she was 12. She’s kept each mode of teen mementos, specified arsenic beads she fashioned retired of tightly-rolled mag pages oregon colorful pieces of clay. Her aboriginal arsenic an artisan was a foregone conclusion.

Photos of Piller’s maternal ancestors enactment the edges of this textural necklace, which features a brace of beetles astatine its center.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Growing up successful Chicago, Piller and her parent performed arsenic clowns astatine birthdays and institution picnics. From ages 7 to 14, it was her occupation to make balloon figures for partygoers — sculpting skills that would travel successful handy. She gained an appreciation for quality and anthropology from mother-daughter sportfishing excursions and regular visits to the Field Museum, which focuses connected earthy history. Her affinity for biology comes from her father, who attended aesculapian schoolhouse erstwhile she was young.

“I had each these books astir maine that had the insides of bodies,” she recalled, “so determination was a fascination with the inside.”

Piller went connected to survey anthropology and coating astatine Rutgers University, making jewelry successful her spare time. During breaks, she’d enactment astatine a Chicago bead store, wherever she learned astir planetary jewelry-making practices. After graduating successful 2004, she moved to Manhattan, spending weekends hawking accessories and hand-painted covering from a sidewalk table. She aboriginal relocated to Santa Fe, N.M., wherever she worked astatine a store selling fossils, minerals and semi-precious stones.

“That’s erstwhile I truly understood that successful each these materials there’s a spiritual side, an energy,” she said. “There’s a quality successful the fusion of each of these materials together.”

Piller moved to Inglewood successful 2019. Asked if L.A. has impacted her enactment the mode erstwhile cities had, she said, “[My] storytelling, communicative broadside has travel to the forefront. There’s decidedly been a shift, successful presumption of reasoning astir however an entity tin archer a story.”

For example, enamored of Pasadena-born writer Octavia Butler, she began referencing the sci-fi legend’s penning and utilizing her likeness, some successful sculptural signifier (as with her 2024 portion “Mission Control. Earthseed.”) and successful her jewelry. She besides started incorporating images of different inspiring women, including her maternal forebears and the Cuban American sculptor Ana Mendieta.

L.A. has shaped her aesthetic successful much literal ways, too.

“A large portion of what I bash is walking and doing municipality hikes,” she said, noting that she’s trekked done astir 20 countries. She’s walked from her workplace to Watts Towers oregon westward to Torrance, collecting things she finds connected the crushed on the mode and yet transforming them. For instance, a brace of jewel-toned beetles she picked up made an perfect centerpiece for a regal bib necklace.

“There’s that broadside of maine that truly gets excited astir looking astatine those objects, past creating my ain benignant of cosmology, my ain artifacts, if you will,” she said. “I’m utilizing ‘high’ gemstones to ‘low’ integrative and elevating each of them, fusing them into 1 enactment that past creates this energy, this power.”