For multimedia artist Emily Rosenblatt, gathering materials for jewelry making is a team effort.
A sled dog owner, Rosenblatt says most of her outdoor adventures involve several of her pups — taking them hiking on the tundra where oftentimes, they find caribou antlers that she cleans up and makes into earrings.
“A lot of the antlers that I use now are either antlers that I have found, or friends find and give to me,” she said. “I do fur sewing sometimes, too, so I use a lot of scraps to embellish those pieces as well.”
The photographer, jewelry maker and painter said that her work aims to envelop the unique, natural environment of interior Alaska. And while most of her art doesn’t feature dogs in her paintings, she says the experiences she ties into her work are oftentimes moments she has experienced with her team.
“A caribou antler, they are so big and there are so many shapes along the antler,” Rosenblatt said. “You can get perfectly round little pieces of it, but at the base where the brow tines of the antler are, you get these really unique wide pieces, and because it’s such a small surface area you usually can only get one pair out of that… every pair is very unique to one another.”
In the summer months, Rosenblatt lives in Cantwell, tucked right up against the tundra, a migratory area for caribou.
“I have found a bunch there over the years — one antler gets you a lot of different pieces of jewelry, so you can make it go pretty far,” she said. “I’ll go through them and see which ones are the best, as far as how they cut on the saw and which ones match one another, because I’m mostly making earrings, so I try and get two pieces that are pretty much identical.”
The multimedia artist works under the name Kestrel Kreations. She got back into painting around five years ago after taking a roughly 10-year hiatus following the death of a close friend. She says diving back in was therapeutic for her.
“Some of [the aurora paintings] are a little more fictional, fantastical looking than what you would see with the naked eye, and others are a little more realistic,” Rosenblatt said.
Last year, Rosenblatt began Rage Craft Circle, which gathers monthly at the Fairbanks Queer Collective, and is excited to continue the group activity this winter.
Sam Davenport is a writer residing in Anchorage. She's a leo and a plant-person, and loves spending quality time with her dog, Aspen. She is a Real Housewives fan and has been called a Bravo historian.
