Arden Bardol is a NICHE Awards winning artist who creates sculptural jewelry and three dimensional objects. Arden received her professional training in architecture, where form follows function. In her wearable art, a passion in her life, form comes from bringing structure, color and texture together in a composition that is both functional and visually pleasing.
Arden’s artistic journey began at a very young age working on small projects with her father. The projects always included wood, string, glass, stones and “found objects”. Throughout her years of elementary school and high school, she always had an art project underway, usually outside of any required class curriculum. College brought an intense study of the built environment but most importantly, her education at Carnegie- Mellon University taught her how to transform her ideas into a built form.
After graduating, she entered into the profession of architecture and interior design, always keeping other design projects underway. Arden studied ceramics with a focus on porcelain for several years at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts where she always pushed the limits of the clay, and learned new firing and glazing techniques. She also studied welding and blacksmith with a desire to incorporate metal and sculpture into the activities of the studio. During her many years of traveling, visiting Japan, Korea, China, Philippines, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and the Midwest regions of the United States she was exposed to the vast cultural influences of each place which she now uses as inspiration in her wearable art.
Arden works with polymer clay that is blended with a variety of mixed metals in a process, which she continually refines. Using polymer and mixed metals as her palette, she creates art jewelry that is inspired by nature's graceful forms combined with clean geometric shapes. Simple forms combined to create intricate, layered compositions; feminine, classic, and playful.
The overall effect is clean, modern art jewelry and sculptural objects. Each of her pieces is hand made and one of a kind. “My work tends toward the classic and the geometric, but has a bit of whimsy.”
Arden opened her studio in 2004. Today she is active in her design studio and has achieved a carefully orchestrated balance of designing both small scale objects to adorn the body and large scale objects that occupy and adorn the “landscape” of our world.