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A volley and a return

5 min read
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Michelle Sabol in her Washington studio

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Model Madeline Gradle wearing Memphis George creation titled, “Crick,” backstage before the Material Worlds Fashion Show hosted by Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh at the Ace Hotel in Pittsburgh.

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Model Tori Mistick wears Memphis George’s dress titled, “Moon Lorn,” inspired from the work artist Malcolm Parcell during the Material Worlds Fashion Show at the Ace Hotel in Pittsburgh.

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Michelle Sabol working at her studio in Washington

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One of Michele Sabol’s pieces

Michelle Sabol has worked in cinema, television and fashion. Lately, though, the Washington artist has identified with sports terminology.

“I’ve been on this whole thought lately of the volley and return. If you keep volleying, and you get no return, you can go mad,” she says. “I think people realize that instinctively, at a young age. If they have a spark of creativity and they’re volleying, and their parents don’t ever return, they’re not going to go toward that. You’ve got to have a volley and a return.”

With her Memphis George line, Sabol creates wearable art in the form of jewelry. Necklaces, cuffs, earrings – her designs are as eclectic as the materials with which she works.

Drawn to exploration of technique and design, Sabol’s pieces have a commonality that Sabol describes as her own.

“Everything I do is slightly pushed, but it’s all balanced back, and that’s very characteristic of almost everything I do,” she says. “I just try to find what might resonate with me and then I just go for it.”

A 1986 Trinity High School graduate, Sabol has lived and worked in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Southwestern Pennsylvania, though, has a sophistication and authenticity she craves.

“If you don’t get out of Pittsburgh, you might never know that what you’re swimming in is a really good thing,” Sabol says. “There’s a lot of support for the arts here. There’s an authenticity here you don’t get in L.A.”

Sabol got her start in television and film production, then moved onto styling clothes for Guess. It was then that she first began to make jewelry.

She launched Memphis George in 1998.

“It was right at the Zeitgeist of handmade. The whole art-fair craft thing was a huge boon in the industry for artists. There was a really big market. The economy was good,” she says. “I got up every day and got to be creative, which is what I wanted. It’s a very three-dimensional thought process. I didn’t know I had that ability. I had always been visual with film and art, and mechanically putting things together. It was really a revelation for me to start making jewelry.”

At the time, Sabol could walk into a shop or boutique, ask to speak to the buyer, and walk out with a check.

While the market for handmade jewelry may have changed, Sabol’s process of creating hasn’t. She produces a line of jewelry, working with the same materials and techniques, until she’s finished.

She typically doesn’t revisit a line once it’s completed.

“I’m just really into exploration, experimentation and materials. I’m always growing,” she says. “I have an insatiable curiosity for materials and what I could do with them and what are the possibilities.”

Though mostly self-taught, Sabol has studied at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and with metalsmith Dickens Bishop through an artists’ co-op that preceded WashArts.

In 2007, she was working at WashArts, which provided a space for artists and offered classes to the community, when her creations were worn by friend and filmmaker Laura Poitras to the Academy Awards.

“It was a great time in Washington for the arts. Dickens Bishop was teaching and I started taking classes. Every week, I was carving wax and casting,” Sabol says. “That’s when I had this big welling up of creativity. I had access to all of this equipment and someone who was an expert to teach me. I learned so much.”

Sabol left Washington from 2011 to 2014 to open a pop-up gallery in Los Angeles. In September 2015, WashArts closed its doors due to a lack of funds. “It’s not as if there isn’t a volley and return here. There is,” she says. “There is an appreciation for art. But artists thrive on other artists – on having a salon.”

Sabol was able to experience the camaraderie of fellow artists as one of 10 selected by the Carnegie Museum of Art to create fashion based on the work of Dutch designer Iris van Herpen. She created two dresses – one made from acrylic glass and one from epoxy resin panels – that were displayed during a fashion show at the Ace Hotel in Pittsburgh on March 24, and during CMOA’s Haute Wired Gala on April 28.

While she continues to create from her workspace – the former home and showplace of fine-arts dealer and appraiser Recco Luppino – Sabol has discovered an intense appreciation for teaching.

Through two grants from the Craftsmen’s Guild of Pittsburgh, Sabol is teaching through Domestic Violence Services of Southwestern Pennsylvania and the LeMoyne Center.

Her experience working with clients of Domestic Violence Services led Sabol to obtain state advocacy credentials. “It’s good to be around people who are in a growth period. To just give them the opportunity to shift their focus into their hands and eyes and out of the inner dialogue. It’s very useful.”

While there are still mediums in which she wants to work, Sabol says she’s grown out of setting goals for herself.

“Whatever the challenge is, I’m up for it. I’ve come to trust myself. I’ve spent so long honing my skills, gathering knowledge about materials and how things come together. But I’m nowhere near where I want to be. There are places I want to go – this is ceaseless experimentation.”

“I think if I just continue, that’s enough. There aren’t many people who could have sustained this type of life for as long as I have,” she says. “That’s my goal, to just keep sending it out. Just to keep volleying is the goal.”

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