Inside the Studio

by Diane Daly

Artist: Leslie Cho Newman
Medium: Jewelry Sculptor
Studio Location: Sixth Street Studios, Warehouse Arts District

here are two definitions of the word microcosm in any dictionary worth its papyrus. One is “a little world”: Picture a fruit-stand you can cuddle in your palm, its mangoes the size of pen tips. The other definition is “a small community:” Think of Peyton Place, or the Donner Party.

But ride the reverie of allergy season back to Gem Show time and ask yourself, what do I get when I weave the two definitions together with a roll of copper twenty-gauge? Well, the little world of Downtown Tucson could surely be your wire, and Tucson’s small community of artists might clatter along as the beads, but then your eyes would widen at the twinkling bauble in the middle, and it would say, “Hello! I’m Leslie Cho Newman.”

Leslie Cho Newman is an ageless jewelry sculptor (and microcosmographer, building tiny sculptures including that fruit stand) whose work is dramatic and stunning, but she’s no introverted artist. In fact, she’s so congenial that she speaks Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, basic Mandarin, and the strange language of the elderly Midwestern dollhouse collector. I heard this last tongue in action after a carload of women on a tour of Tucson stopped to ask directions during our interview. “What do you do? What’s your work?” Leslie asked the oldest out of nowhere. Within minutes the woman was hoisting her pleats onto the cement loading dock at Sixth Street Studios, lamenting the death of the name Marjorie in modern days, and musing in ecstasy about her favorite dollhouse displays of all time.

“It had a miniature toilet. And it flushed!” Marjorie remembered.

“That’s the bomb,” Leslie replied. And on they went.

Leslie makes neither jewelry nor miniature sculptures for her living these days. She was a successful mainstream jeweler at one time, but found it lonely. “People don’t realize, when you choose to be an artist you spend a lot of time by yourself,” she explained. She also grew weary of what she called “production,” which “took a lot of the joy out of my work.” Since then she has only worked custom, and delights in watching her pieces go to good homes. “My work is made for people’s necks,” she said outside her studio that day, sunlight glinting from her freckled shoulders, inch-thick choker and canyon-wide smile. “What I love about jewelry is that people wear it.” She herself is always in motion; a steady capoeira performer, she also channels a lot of restless energy into making objects, and builds jewelry with motion in mind. “You can’t make a piece of jewelry that doesn’t move well with a human body as it lives, breathes, dances, loves, dies.”

The character of each of the objects in Leslie’s pieces can be as vivid as the person wearing it. Leslie formerly made jewelry for Piney Hollow on Fourth Avenue, and she lovingly recounts her role there this way: “When a drunk guy would come in with his grandmother’s molar and want it in a necklace, they’d say, ‘Let Leslie do it.’” She’s sculpted custom work for Council Member Carol West using buttons from West’s heirloom collection. Her technique for making common objects stand out is to craft intricate wire-wrap frames with ironwork-style flourishes around them.

And the strangest component she’s used in a piece?

“Jewelry made out of sea kelp. It was all dried out but it still smelled.”

When not transforming everyday objects into art, Leslie helps everyday folks find their inner artist. “Most folks don’t feel it’s beyond their realm to string something,” she believes, so she combines this accessible activity with a view of objects as artifacts. As former director of the Art in Reality (AIR) youth program, she would ask high school students to consider as they strung that the beads they were using—White Russians—were once traded for slaves. Recently she moved to a new population, creating programs for the Armory Park Senior Center. “A lot of the seniors bring in these old, old art forms I’ve never seen before,” she says with admiration. At the Center she has recently learned quilling, an art employing ringlets of paper, and is now planning to create a paper jewelry series.

The diverse histories of the objects she pulls together are what drew Leslie to sculpting jewelry in the first place. The Chinese-American daughter of a foreign diplomat, she grew up in twelve different countries before she settled in Tucson, and believes “combining small parts” helps her culturally define herself. “Jewelry is a way of taking all these elements of myself and bringing them into something visually cohesive,” she says. “But,” she laughs, “I definitely feel I’m being used for my nimble little Chinese hands.”