Far from home, artist designs 'nature to wear'

She strung 800 hand-forged silver helicopter seeds together to create a neck-piece entitled "800 Wishes Home." Sim Luttin is now more than 8,000 miles away from her home in Melbourne, Australia. \n"I am interested in my natural surroundings here versus back home. My work maps my travels," she said. "I want to take pieces of it back."\nLuttin is at IU on a full-ride scholarship from the Friends of Art to complete her master's degree in metalsmithing and jewelry design. She is one year into her three-year program.\nShe began her undergraduate study in speech pathology at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology but quickly switched to art.\n"In high school I was torn between the health sciences and art," she said. "I was streamlined into doing something that was more practical, but then I realized that I couldn't just make art my hobby. It had to be my life."\nShe said she is very interested in combining her two passions and furthering the relationship between art and the body, hence her attraction to jewelry. She said that she likes the idea of art being worn. Even though the pieces are functional, she said that they are often impractical.\nLuttin has been in more than 18 exhibitions in the past five years, been featured in four art publications and taught six art courses. She has completed artist residencies in Adelaide, Australia, Deer Isle, Maine and Mount Saint Francis, Ind.\nShe volunteers at the School of Fine Arts Gallery and is working on co-curating an exhibit for next fall. The exhibit, "Field of Vision: Contemporary Jewelry and Hollowware," will be a showcase of the signature works of several prominent and emerging North American and international jewelry designers. Luttin said it will be the largest IU metalsmithing show since 1985. There will be a jewelry auction this spring to raise funds for the event.\nLuttin is exploring the application of her experiences with the wintry Indiana landscape to her work. She wants to continue creating art jewelry and is preparing for her first solo show. She would eventually like to start a gallery either here or in Australia to raise public awareness for contemporary art jewelry. In the long run, she would also like to secure a teaching position because she loves collaboration as much as she loves the individual creation of her work.\nShe explained that one piece of jewelry can take anywhere from one week to one month to complete. She begins each project with simple, loose sketches and then gathers inspiration from flower samples that she presses and from photocopies that her family sends her. She then thinks about how the piece will attach to the body and moves to the technical aspects of forming the metal.\nIn her artist statement, Luttin said, "I am hoping to entice those who don't take objects at face value, to take the time to investigate each piece; the undulating surface texture on each unit and the space it occupies and simultaneously contains"