Jude Clarke grew up in an environment of making, first in a house that her parents built from scratch in the deep woods of Maine, and later in Upstate NY. Her father was a model maker and luthier. As such, there were always fine tools and tiny parts for her to ponder and she witnessed the awareness that ideas could become physical reality. She moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1982, and it was there that she first fell in love with metal as medium at the local community college. She has been a self-employed metalsmith since 1992, and continues to develop her ideas and process through workshops and collaborations with other artists locally and internationally.
In her most recent series, “Retrospectives,” she combines distressed rear view mirrors and antique European serigraphs to reflect upon the present while looking into the past, blurring the line between the two. This series was selected by the Society of North American Goldsmiths, (SNAG) for feature in the annual publication, “Jewelry and Metals Survey.”