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Jewelry maker creates art you can wear
YOUNGSTOWN — Marcie Roepke-Applegate’s studio in the old Ward Bakery Building is spacious, organized and furnished with a rough eclecticism.
Glassblock walls bathe it in light. Mismatched chairs and a well-worn sofa create a bohemian effect. A pond with live carp gurgles near a corner.
The artist applied Feng Shui principles to turn a completely open concrete room into an inviting space in which people feel comfortable.
It’s a perfect environment for Roepke-Applegate to create her signature bronze and silver jewelry.
The artist embellishes her designs with gems, colored glass and other objects, and melds them into earrings, barrettes and pendants by baking them in a kiln that reaches 1600 degrees. On hot summer days, she really lives her art — the temperature in her third-floor studio rises into the upper 80s.
Roepke-Applegate has been in the monolithic former bakery building — which now houses the Artists of the Mahoning Commons — for about seven years. The Boardman native runs her company, Flybird Designs, and teaches jewelry-making there.
She has become one of the mainstays of the artists’ colony, and is a regular at local festivals where artisans sell and demonstrate their work, including this weekend’s Summer Festival of the Arts at YSU.
A 1981 graduate of Boardman High School, Roepke-Applegate attended Columbus College of Art and Design and Youngstown State University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree.
She got into jewelry-making simply because that’s where her art took her.
“I was always interested in art, and I enjoyed every class I took,” she said, explaining that she had no preference between painting, sculpture or any other discipline. But after taking a ceramics class taught by fellow Ward building artist Lynn Cardwell, everything soon fell into place.
“I never thought I’d be teaching and making jewelry for a living,” she said.
She mostly uses silver clay in her works. “It’s pliable, but after it comes out of the kiln, it’s pure silver,” she said, because the material that binds it is melted away.
“I like the organic nature of it. It appeals to people and it’s a little different from the traditional,” she said, adding, “It’s also affordable.” Her prices range from $5 to $75.
Roepke-Applegate has developed a regular customer base over the years and her sales have grown.
She exhibits at about a dozen shows a year, and also participates in Ward building open houses every few months in which customers make their own jewelry for a small fee. “It’s a perfect mother-daugher project,” she said. Her next open house is Aug. 15-16.
Roepke-Applegate also opens her studio to tours that come through the Ward building. “It’s a neat environment,” she said. “School kids like it. It gets them out to see where art is being made.”