Edina Shrestha, Jeweler
By Lee Hurley
Edina Shrestha, whose jewelry will be on display at the 42nd Magic City Art Connection, designs jewelry that reflects her spirituality and is fueled by frequent visits to her home in Katmandu, Nepal. Edina meditates, practices yoga, and connects her art with the chakras—energy centers located along the spine that are believed to influence physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Each of her stones represent these chakras in different ways, and they cover everything from love and healing to wisdom, power and sexuality.
And yet Edina’s journey to jewelry design serpentines through a career in interior design in Washington, D.C. followed by an MBA degree at UAB and consulting here in Birmingham (where her husband is a professor of Public Health) and then time dedicated to raising her 21-year-old son and 20-year-old daughter who graduated Indian Springs and are now both at Tulane University in New Orleans. After all, the idea that experience and life are essential for developing good art is as old as Nepal.
While spirituality guides her creative process, Edina’s skill in design was inherited from her late uncle, a jewelry maker in Nepal. It was at his studio that she began to have thoughts about designing her own jewelry one day.
The caste system helped too. Nepal has 36 castes, and each has its own art trade. “I’m Newari, and our caste is known for jobs in architecture, sculpting, painting, woodcarving, pottery making and metal work,” she says. “So there must have been a larger historical element attracting me to this field.”
Edina’s jewelry blends East and West, ancient and modern. “I use many techniques to create inlay fusion jewelry—mixing stones of different shapes and origins to create unique designs,” she says. “I hand-draw them. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to sketch a new idea.”
Most of Edina’s jewelry is sold at festivals like Magic City Art Connection and Moss Rock, which she has been doing for years, but she also creates custom pieces for clients. “When I do these shows, my customers just find me, and they inspire my creations. I did not know that I would make it this far in Birmingham. I used to travel, because I worried my art would not do well here. Now I’m just local and so thankful that these wonderful people seek out and support my art.
Edina’s work will be shown at the 42nd Annual
Magic City Art Connection April 25-27th at Sloss
Furnaces magiccityart.com/artists/edina-shrestha/.
Claire Cormany, Painter
By Barry Wise Smith
For the past 16 years, through location changes and festival growth, artist Claire Cormany has set up her tent and exhibited her atmospheric landscape paintings at the Magic City Art Connection. But when Cormany arrived in Birmingham in 1990 to attend Samford University, she had no way of knowing that she would still be here.
At Samford, Cormany majored in graphic design and minored in painting. “I’ve never not painted,” she says. After graduation, Cormany began her first post-college job as a designer for the company
that became United Healthcare (“I got them through the name change,” Cormany remembers, “That was a bear!”). But despite her day job, Cormany never stopped painting.
Cormany also always assumed that she would eventually return home to Florida. “But I fell in love with the people here,” she says. After a couple of job changes, Cormany decided it was time to put down permanent roots. “I started looking for houses in a couple areas of town, but I happened on an online listing for a house that was exactly what I was looking for,” Cormany recalls.
The house—a California modern built in 1973 on the side of the mountain in Vestavia Hills—had all the elements Cormany was looking for. After finding the listing on a Saturday (and peering through the windows of the house that was unoccupied at the time), Cormany toured the home on Sunday, and made her offer on Monday. “I saw myself being able to create in this house,” she says.
“I call it my treehouse.”
Cormany moved into the house in 2007 and was immediately inspired by the design. The house features 22-foot ceilings and four-foot by eight-foot panel windows across the front and the back of the house, which flood the interiors with natural light all day long. “It’s perfect for painting,” Cormany says. “I truly live in a glass house. I paint all over the house because there are lots of opportunities for different light. Sometimes I paint outside on the deck (the house features two) when it’s a nice day.”
Cormany describes her paintings as loose interpretations of the familiar. “I’m trying to capture an overall feeling—a moment. I squint as I take in a scene that I plan to paint,” she says. “Squinting gives me the values, colors, forms and shapes. It frees my mind to reinterpret the scene without constraint. Then I start making a loose mess with underpainting and keep shaping it until the form emerges. Every single painting I do feels like a failure until that magic moment when it clicks and the scene takes shape. I know I just have to keep going.”
All these years later, Cormany is still feeling the inspiration here. “I came for college, but I stayed because this community is an artistically inspiring place. It’s home,” she says.
Cormany will be showing her acrylic and oil
paintings at the 42nd Magic City Art Connection
at Sloss Furnaces from April 25-27. For more
information, visit her website clairecormany.com
or on Instagram @cormanybyclaire.
