Cat Bates: Maine Jewelry Designer with Monhegan Island Roots

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I am Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me in the studio artist Cat Bates. How are you today?

Cat Bates: I'm doing well, thank you, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: So Cat, I have one of your pieces. When I say artist, you are an artist in not the way that we traditionally think of the artists that I often interview here, which are the ones that create beautiful things to put on walls. You create beautiful things to put on people, typically.

Cat Bates: Yes, I'm a jewelry designer.

Lisa Belisle: So how did you get into that line of work?

Cat Bates: I've been at it for a long time. I got a very early start. I've been making jewelry since I was truly a kid, five or six, maybe eight years old. Just knotted bracelets and things like that. I was lucky enough to grow up out on Monhegan Island, and in that community, which is an active fishing community, just honestly picking up pieces of rope on the ground and playing with them is how I got started, which is a silly but also honest answer. Studied at Maine College of Art. I'd started taking metalsmithing classes when I was in middle school, just on the weekends and things like that, and had an aptitude for it. So I got a degree from Maine College of Art, and I've been doing this full-time for about six, maybe eight years now, and professionally for coming up on 20 years.

Lisa Belisle: This piece that I was very excited to find in my jewelry box, it does have a very kind of nautical feel to it, and I know that the clasps that you use specifically on, I think bracelets, but probably also necklaces, similarly have kind of that more ocean-going feel to them. So as you were growing up on Monhegan, were you looking at the things that were connecting the stuff on lobster traps, let's just say.

Cat Bates: Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: I'm thinking, oh, that's interesting. I'd like to use this differently.

Cat Bates: Yeah, I think that that environment really informed my sense of beauty and what that means to me. I've long followed the adage form follows function, and I'm really drawn to utilitarian forms, and marine hardware is particularly interesting to me. For one, it's something that I've been exposed to for a long time, and so it's like this warm, familiar association with it. And then as I've been working with jewelry, perhaps part of the reason that I work with jewelry is it's a unique kind of hardware. It's a unique kind of utility because of the parameters that it's working within. We've got these metal elements that, particularly historically when we're looking at the use of hemp rope and cotton rope, are working with these soft fibrous materials. So things need to be able to integrate, and you get a lot of smooth forms, you get polished forms, you get forms that are easy to use with cold hands or with wet hands. These are a lot of the same parameters that to me make good jewelry, which is jewelry that you can put on, you can forget about. You don't have to really be conscious of as you're wearing. It can blend in to your appearance. For me personally, I really like making pieces that people can put on and just forget about and leave on and wear in the ocean or in the shower and sleep in. So that kind of comfort and practicality is even more important.

Cat Bates: I would note also that I design and make all of the hardware that I use. That's really important to me. I want to have control over all the different steps of the process and all the elements of the design. So there are very, very few of the pieces that I make that I am not designing from the ground up.

Lisa Belisle: So as I'm looking at this piece and I'm looking at the clasp, I have no idea what it entails to actually design a clasp to go on a bracelet like this. Would you walk me through that?

Cat Bates: I'm happy to. So that specific piece there, I started out with sheets of thick plate brass that were about three sixteenths of an inch, maybe closer to an eighth of an inch thick, each three layers that were all cut to the profiles of those elements. The reason there were three layers is that I could define a crisp hinge. That piece has a hinge built into it. So those layers essentially created a topograph of the final form, with that hinge, that mechanical detail, being very defined from the beginning. Once that detail and the basic outline was defined, I then carved the metal to create that form. There's other ways to do it, but it's the process that I used for that particular piece. My process does tend to vary piece to piece. Sometimes I'll carve wax, sometimes I'll carve directly in metal.

Cat Bates: Sometimes I'll carve plastic or wood. I'll often bounce between a few different techniques. In more recent designs, I'll make something out of wax and then have it 3D modeled and print it so we can play with the scale or refine pertinent geometric details that have to be just right in the digital space, and then go back after the fact and finish that form by hand or pair it with a process that will give it a richer character than something that is just, oh, it's 3D printed, and then it's cast, and then it's done. It's still got to be interesting.

Lisa Belisle: So you've said that you've been doing this sort of work for 20 years. I'm assuming there were not 3D printers back in the day. Has your process evolved, or has your art evolved over the last two decades given the new technology that is out there?

Cat Bates: I would say yes to the first part of that question. I don't think that the new technology has radically changed the kinds of shapes that I'm making, but it has sped up the process. I think of it like table saw versus hand saw. They both cut things. One happens to be really good at cutting things very square, but you can cut something square with a hand saw. You just have to take a lot longer. So it's an efficiency, but to me, with both, you need a good design to get a good piece of art. The tool that you use just dictates how quickly you get there. Does that answer the question?

Lisa Belisle: It does, yeah. And it is interesting also that you move back and forth amongst techniques. It's not like you're ever in any way mass producing. I mean, I guess you could be with a 3D printer. You could be doing more than you might've done once if you were doing all hand carved, but you're still very carefully paying attention to the design as you're going along.

Cat Bates: When I say I bounce between techniques, I would mean that specifically in the development of a design. When I'm actually making the pieces of jewelry, there are two primary techniques that most pieces are incorporating, with plenty of exceptions of course, but lost wax casting and sand casting. The way that I get to the master, which will then either be sand cast or lost wax cast, varies a lot. But for most designs, the metal elements are made using one of those two techniques.

Lisa Belisle: So what can you accomplish differently between those two?

Cat Bates: Yeah, that's a really fun distinction. So the piece that you have in front of you there, the metal hardware is lost wax cast. Lost wax casting allows for complex surfaces, internal geometries, undercuts, and a very high level of detail. When I use lost wax casting, I would use it for pieces that require very precise geometry, that require undercuts, or pieces where the form has some visual complexity to it that adds intrigue. On that piece there, the curvature of the different parts and how they blend together is intentionally reminiscent of a bone form. So that form itself is kind of doing the aesthetic talking. With sand cast pieces, those tend to be pieces that are simpler in form, not necessarily less exciting or less beautiful, but where they're not bringing as much detail. The coolest thing about sand casting from an aesthetic standpoint strictly is that it naturally leaves a really rich, gritty surface texture, similar to actually the walls behind us, as opposed to the surface of the table, which is lost wax cast. The grit of the wall is closer to a sand cast. So rather than decorating my surfaces with patterning, I am using processes that celebrate the form itself. The two different casting processes lend themselves to different kinds of forms.

Lisa Belisle: So as you're designing, are you considering what you're going to be using, whether it's the lost wax or the sand casting? Are you considering which direction you're going to be going in, or how does that usually work?

Cat Bates: I am usually thinking about it pretty early on in a process. I'm going to have an idea of how complicated the shape needs to be to get where I need to go with it, particularly if it's something that has some mechanical element to it. If it's like a pendant or a cuff bracelet that's going to be a static shape, there's a little bit more flexibility there, and then it has to do more with the aesthetic goals. But early on in the process, I'd probably know what I'm going to use. Economy is a factor. For larger pieces, it's more economical to sand cast them in-house. For smaller pieces, it is generally more economical to job out lost wax casting them. I have a great relationship with a foundry down in Rhode Island that I've been working with for eight plus years now. They do the vast majority of my lost wax casting, but just the way their pricing works, larger pieces get very expensive very quickly. So if I can sand cast those, I will. As far as deciding which one to use, I think it is mostly an aesthetic decision. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to get things to sand cast and how can I bring this awesome surface texture onto a new form. Sand casting's a very industrial technique. It has these really rigid parameters that have influenced my aesthetics as I've started to use the process, and I think that's really cool, but also what can I do to break these parameters and make something new is a fun question to ask.

Lisa Belisle: So it sounds like that is at least a pretty significant part of the art and the creativity of this.

Cat Bates: Yes. The design of the pieces that I'm making and how they're going to be made is a hundred percent part of my creative outlet as an artist.

Lisa Belisle: So initially growing up on Monhegan, I'm assuming that there weren't jewelry designers up and down your street. Having been to Monhegan a few times, it's a very artistic community, but much of the art that seems to be produced out there is painting, for example. So you're a kid, you're going to Maine College of Art, you decide, I'm going to do metal work, I'm going to do jewelry design. Where did that come from? How did you get inspired to follow that particular artistic pathway?

Cat Bates: I've always enjoyed mechanics and mechanisms and been intrigued by how things work. As a kid, getting my hands on a broken camera and getting to take it apart was the best. It was as fun as it got. I went to Maine College of Art for their jewelry program. I had started studying jewelry when I was in middle school, taking classes at Maine College of Art. My mother was a non-traditional student at Maine College of Art. She'd gone to school earlier in her life and was going and getting more credits, and was taking Intro to 3D, Intro to 2D, mold making, and brought home a continuing studies catalog, which she just discreetly left on the kitchen counter. She and my dad, they did great with this one, just left it there. And then maybe a week later asked me, oh, you see anything that was interesting?

Cat Bates: It was like, actually that jewelry class looked really cool, and they had assumed that that's the one that I would do. And I have a good relationship with my parents. I trust them when they say that they made that guess. I don't know how. But as soon as I started with it, it clicked very quickly. I'd done a little bit of sports, done a little bit of this and that, and was a decent student overall, decently engaged overall. But it was the first thing I'd ever done that really spoke to me, and I just haven't looked back. So I got lucky to find that so early on in my life.

Lisa Belisle: That is so intriguing, the fact that you're a middle school student, and even then you said, this is the form that calls to me. This is what I want to be doing.

Cat Bates: That's weird. Yeah.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I was going to say intriguing is the word I used. It's interesting because I think it gives you a little bit more of a jumpstart if you're starting in middle school as to the work that you're doing.

Cat Bates: Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: As an artist. So you went into doing this full-time eight years ago.

Cat Bates: Approximately. Yeah. I have to do some math in my head.

Lisa Belisle: So what were you doing before that, and what gave you the opportunity to say, okay, this is really what I want to do now?

Cat Bates: That's a great way to phrase the question, because access to opportunity was very relevant in that. So when I graduated from MECA, while I was still studying at MECA, I started my business during that time, and during the summers was living out on Monhegan Island. For the last year or two of school I was working in the studio for most of the time during the summer, and then was also working in commercial kitchens, just at restaurants and in food service. I continued to do that after graduating, and that was my primary income. When I moved back to Portland, I was working at David's restaurant, first as a dishwasher and then as cold pantry, and bringing my artistic training to these positions. To be honest, I can make a very pretty salad. And I was lucky enough to get a job working at Maine College of Art as the technician in the metals department. So I had a studio set up at home. As soon as I moved back, I was making work, but it was getting that position that gave me access to equipment and access to facilities and access to community, which obviously is really important with things like this.

Cat Bates: I've forgotten what the question was, but I think I can carry this out. Oh, yes. Opportunity. So I had the opportunity to create work in a fully outfitted studio, also having a smaller studio at home, but this larger space. And that was a really important stepping stone, especially once I started to get personal wholesale contracts, having access to a larger space. At that point, I was doing my own lost wax casting. It was at that point that I started to teach myself sand casting. It was like just digging around in the closets, trying to understand what equipment was on hand so that I could tell the students what was available. And I found this box of stuff that I had no idea what it was, and started watching a lot of YouTube videos and reading a lot of books and taught myself how to sand cast. So there's definitely some networking there. There's definitely some talent there. But also I got really lucky in that. I just had the personality to be able to do that job. And then also access to Monhegan, access to audience was huge.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I would think that the people who come to Monhegan, obviously there's a longstanding arts community, a lot of people who come in the summer, that's specifically why they go. But even just as not an artist going there with my kids and walking around the island and just being connected, I can see how your work would really be very appealing, because there is something very reminiscent of a summer's day on a boat in the work that you do. Instead of just carrying around this memory with you, I think that's really powerful.

Cat Bates: I wholesale my work around the country, and I have customers around the world purchasing through my website, and I definitely do the best here in New England. I think you're spot on. If someone is visiting, it's a really easy reminder of the atmosphere of this place. And if someone lives here, then it's a really easy thing to appreciate because you can relate to it.

Lisa Belisle: You're in Biddeford now. Tell me about that.

Cat Bates: When we moved off of Monhegan, we moved to Palermo, Maine. This was when I was in elementary school. At that time, my dad was finishing up college, and we then moved to the Kennebunkport area when I was entering middle school and going through high school, and moved up to Portland for college, lived up there. I moved back to Portland and had been living there for a while, I think a little bit less than a decade. I really liked living in Portland. And towards the end of that time, I started working full-time. I had my studio in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook, which is a beautiful space, but I was starting to think about wanting to have a house. I had worked from home, having studios set up in my living space, and in studios that I commute to. So I had familiarity with both formats. I knew that I really appreciated a live-work format. I know that worked for me.

Cat Bates: I started making moves, but the real motivating factor was when the Dana Warp Mill sold and entered under new ownership. I did not feel very stable in the space, especially where I'm doing my own casting, and so have some more industrial requirements compared to a lot of other artists. I need to be able to use compressed gases and have pretty robust ventilation to do my work safely. Safety is cool. So I was shopping for houses, and I did not expect to be able to move to Biddeford. It was certainly on the list, because it was close to my parents, and I knew it was a beautiful area, and I knew there was a lot going on there, but I assumed that I'd missed the boat economically. I know that it had been up and coming for a while. And when the house that I'm in now came on the market, it was a shock, but I looked at it, it checked the right boxes, and went into contract.

Cat Bates: And then about two weeks later, right after the inspection got finished up, the state went into lockdown. So it was a very, very stressful thing to commit to, but I'm really glad that I did. I really like Biddeford. It is changing a lot. That comes up basically whenever you talk about Biddeford, is its economic revitalization and how different it looks. I like that it still has grit, to be perfectly honest. That is more attractive to me, that character, than the stuff that's coming in now. I recognize that economic growth does have benefits by and large, but I also feel a little bit sad when I see demographics changing, and social equity is really important to me. Housing in particular is something that I'm really passionate about. I didn't realize until moving down there that housing affordability is even worse in Biddeford than it is in Portland, because it has historically been such a lower income community that as it became popular, folks got priced out really fast as the cost of living increased, which is really sad.

Cat Bates: So that's something that I've done my best to get involved with down there, is advocating for that. I think I mentioned that I've been doing a lot of renovation on my house, and part of that is turning it into a multi-unit so that I can offer more housing. I'm building an accessory dwelling unit that I'll move into. It's located over the studio, really excited about that Euro-style setup. And then we'll rent the front of the house. Hopefully the person that I have living in it now will stick around. Nick's awesome. It's my old studio mate from Westbrook. Shout out to Berlian Arts. They're amazing. If you need any digital work done as a jeweler, photo, web design, CAD, et cetera, they do excellent work.

Lisa Belisle: You're talking about Biddeford, and I know it's been undergoing revitalization, and you talked about Westbrook, and that also underwent revitalization.

Cat Bates: Yeah, good point.

Lisa Belisle: I think as somebody who's lived in Maine a long time and has actually family who's connected to both Westbrook and Biddeford, and in fact the mill employment in both of those places, and particularly in Biddeford where I believe my great grandparents were working, and at the very least my great-great grandparents and that family. Back then when you talked about multifamily units, you were talking about straight up mill housing, and you're talking about people who walked down the street to the mills, did their work, walked back up the street.

Cat Bates: And.

Lisa Belisle: It's so interesting to think about the fact that it was just a very different kind of art in a very big and industrial way. People were still making things, but they had no opportunity to participate in the creativity. But in a weird way, this was sort of the industrialization of New England. It actually presented opportunities at the time that got people off farms and got people out of other places. So I think this latest transition that you're describing, it's one of so many of the transitions that's happened in mill towns across the state of Maine. It's kind of funny that you're in the middle of it, because you're seeing the social equity coming back around again, and you're participating in creating something that I think was the standard probably a century ago.

Cat Bates: I think it was easier to live a century ago.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. I know that was a very convoluted comment, last question, so thank you for your patience with that.

Cat Bates: Of course.

Lisa Belisle: But I think it's what I love about talking about, for example, your experience with the Dana Warp Mill. It's unfortunate that it went to a place where you were no longer able to be there, but I love that artists have kind of gone in to fill the spaces in these mills. When I had my medical practice in the mill near the Royal River here in Yarmouth, there was a glass blowing studio just down the hall. So I think that's the thing that I love about being creative, is that you look at a space and you don't think, oh, well, we can't make textiles there anymore, what are we going to do with it? You look at it and you think, oh, well, we could do something else there.

Cat Bates: I mentioned being attracted to the grit that Biddeford still has, and I think that speaks to exactly what you're talking about. Its potential. It hasn't been defined yet, and that's really exciting. Something that I would love to see happen in the state, I don't believe it exists yet, but I know there's other parts of the country where different kinds of factories have been converted into live-work artist spaces. I think that's a really neat model, because it is very expensive, especially as you're starting out. It is very hard to access, especially as you're starting out, both studio space and housing. And it is hard to make a living as an artist, especially if you're building from the ground up. It's really challenging. So making that more accessible, just changing zoning, I think is the one bigger hurdle there. And then maybe public appetite to allow those kinds of rental opportunities to exist so that it can be used for both.

Lisa Belisle: The other thing that I'm intrigued by is that we've been talking about jewelry, but you also have been involved in bandanas.

Cat Bates: Yeah.

Lisa Belisle: That seems like a little bit of an offshoot, or maybe a pretty big offshoot, I don't know, but tell me about that project.

Cat Bates: Yeah, so this is a really fun project. It's the most recent project that I've wrapped up, the Saline collaboration with Douglas W. Milliken. It's the second bandana that Doug and I have worked on together. Douglas is a good friend, he's a Maine author. He's written a couple of novels. I think his third novel is coming out soon. Many short stories. We started working together five or six or seven years ago when I was designing a cuff bracelet based on the form of an oarlock, and thinking about why that form is relevant to me, and I remembered this experience that I had when I was a kid growing up out on Monhegan, ferrying a family across the harbor and getting across the harbor and losing an oarlock over the side of the skiff.

Cat Bates: It was a really fun memory that had some interesting layers to it. This reminds me of a Doug story. So I reached out to him and I was like, hey man, do you want to write a story about this and we'll figure out some way to incorporate it with the piece? And he wrote the story. It's great. We went through a few different ideas and decided to print it on a bandana, wanting something that would have some practicality, that would have some physicality. It's a very short story. So just having it on a piece of eight and a half by eleven paper didn't really feel like enough of a celebration of its artistry.

Cat Bates: It was a really, really fun project to work on. I did the graphic design and the illustration for it. He wrote the story. A friend of his did the printing locally. We actually found a font that had been designed by, oh gosh, I'm blanking on the professor's name, but one of the professors from Maine College of Art designed a font that happened to fit really well with it. So we used this locally made font, which was really fun, and developed a packaging concept, et cetera. So really fun project. Doug came to me with a story after that, and I designed a pendant that went with it, and we developed a more robust packaging concept for that one. And so more recently, I was wrapping up a necklace design. It's called the Portal necklace. It's up on my website now.

Cat Bates: Visually, it looks kind of like a donut, and then it has a little loop at the top. It's much more beautiful than a donut in my opinion, but it is just a round inner tube shape that hangs on a cord. I like being able to tell people the inspiration and where did this piece come from? And I was feeling a little bit of frustration with that piece because it had just kind of happened. But I started thinking about how did this happen? I had this chunk of metal that had been sitting on my bench for years that I'd eventually got around to hacking up. I think I'd made it as a lost wax casting sample at some point, but I couldn't remember exactly when. And I clearly worked over the whole surface with a hammer at least once, if not twice, just chasing the whole thing.

Cat Bates: So this shape that had this lost history was still beautiful and still inspiring me and still influencing me. And I was talking to my mom about it. I'm like, and she's like, but that's so cool. That is an interesting backstory, that something that's been lost is still relevant and still affects me. And so this sounds like a Doug story. So I reached out to Douglas and he came back with a few options, and I read through Saline. It's like, yeah, okay. It isn't a direct match, but I liked that it's what he thought of when he heard that story. That felt like true collaboration to me. It's a bounce back and forth. Our original plan had been to have a strong visual tie-through between the two pieces, not necessarily have them a set. We went into it from the beginning of, let's just see what it's like to make a bandana. I love wearing bandanas. I think they're just like a nice fashion accessory, and I liked the idea of having a lower price point item as well.

Cat Bates: So we played around with some crossover with the design and ended up paring that back and paring that back. So it's a very subtle connection now, but for me, still relevant. Like, oh, cool, I see how they connect. But I brought the graphic design to the piece and the logistics, finding a local printer, researching the different ways of doing the printing to get the highest quality product we could, going through the proofing process, all the layout and what have you. And then I'm managing the distribution of them. It's a cool story. It's funny. It's about folks that are coming out of sad places and finding joy in just simple moments, a simple moment of them sitting there in the morning laughing about a story, and the narrator totally lost track of the thread and has no idea what's going on, but is enjoying it because his wife is happy as she's telling him, and their cat's hanging out with him. It's very basic, and it's very subtle, and it makes me really happy. Every time I've read through it, I've felt a stronger connection to it, and it speaks to me more, and to my desire to appreciate those moments, and a reminder to appreciate those moments and to be grateful for the things that I have, however small they are, or the things that feel big for me.

Lisa Belisle: Well, as someone who appreciates the connection between art and story, that also speaks to me. And I love the collaboration that you're describing. I think that makes it even more powerful that you kind of cross different media to come up with this.

Cat Bates: Yeah.

Lisa Belisle: Cat, how can people learn about the work that you do?

Cat Bates: Well, my website is cat-bates.com, and then if you're on there, I would love it if anybody signed up for my newsletter. I put a lot of effort into that. I put out a few a year, so it's not very often. I work really hard to not make it spammy. It is truly an update on what I've been working on, what I'm thinking about these days. And then of course I am on social media at catbatesjewelry on Instagram, and if folks are interested in learning, then my website is definitely the best place to start. There's a lot of text on all the product pages. And then on the info tab, there's a big chunk of inspiration listed under there, and just information about, we haven't even gotten into the cord work that I do, and I say made from scratch. The cord on that piece is hand braided, hand spliced, and that's true for a lot of the designs that I make. So talking about those different processes as well. And if anyone wants to read Saline, that story, I decided to publish it in full on my website. So I would love it for folks to purchase the bandana, but you can also just enjoy the story as it's on the product page. It's there in full.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I invite people to go to Cat's website, but certainly as a working artist who is supporting themselves, please buy stuff, that would obviously be ideal. So learn about things and also buy the art. It's truly been a pleasure having jewelry designer and artist Cat Bates, a former Monhegan resident, a very special place, here in the studio with me today. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for listening to or watching Radio Maine, and thank you, Cat, for coming in and having this conversation with me today.

Cat Bates: Thanks so much for the questions, Lisa.