Jane Sipe - Designs of the Gods | Lost Myths Ink, LLC

Designs of the Gods
©2002 by Debora Hill
MedioCom

Graton, California doesn't qualify as much more than a dot on the map, but it boasts the birth and development of a thriving commercial enterprise, Jane Iris Designs. Until 1999, the resident artist, designer and president was Jane Sipe. She has now sold Jane Iris to Patti-Ann Sansone, who moved the operation to San Diego. Sipe remains with the company as a designer and corporate advisor.
Sipe started as a jewelry designer and added sculpture to her repertoire after Jane Iris became a going concern. The images are deceptively simple with clean lines depicting symbols that stretch their meanings from the ancient to the current. Three of the available statues are enlarged versions of the designs mentioned below. They are both elegant and meaningful. Sansone told me Jane Iris still carries all of Sipe's designs, including jewelry in silver, gold and bronze, candles and bronze sculptures. Sipe explains the most popular designs...
"Our three most popular jewelry designs are the Spirit Healer, Receptivity and the Goddess Primordial. I did the Spirit Healer in the early 1980's. That has consistently been a strong piece in whatever form we make it. People need healing, our spirits are damaged. Archetypically the design just matches up with what we need. 
"I have another design, called Healing Embrace, which I created as a pin and as a ring. The image is non-gender-specific, universal; you just know how that feels, to be held in that way. It's what people need in their lives. What I'm doing is creating symbols for people to look at, to wear, to interact with, that are about the kinds of challenges that we're facing ... about the kinds of healing that we need to be doing. Very consciously, that's been my guiding motivation."
There are a great many Goddess and healing designs in the catalog; Womb Moom, Gestation, Elation, Harpy, A Different Drummer-Joy in Diversity and the rest of the list could fill this article. Jane Sipe is nothing if not productive. Productive, and that other rarity among artists, business oriented. The story of her art is the story of her life and business. Her mother must have been the first to foster her interest. 
"My mother is an artist. She was always making art. I grew up in rural Ohio, so mother created her own art associations and tried to create beauty for herself around the art. By association with that, I think I was drawn in, somewhat. I became involved with art in my high school art classes. Mostly I was playing around with graphic art at the time and I designed the yearbook covers.
"Because I didn't want to be a carbon copy of my mother, I ended up going off to college and studying psychology. I became a probation officer for seven years; I was a great probation officer! I was young and I was dealing with juveniles and they were really able to identify with me because of my youth. `Here's an adult person who is more like us, and not like our parents.' I did a good job of it, but it's a burn-out kind of career.
"Towards the end of that time I became interested in jewelry making. I took a class and that was the beginning of the rest of the story. That night, when I went home, I lay awake in bed all night long thinking what I could do. The ideas were flowing and flowing and flowing. I couldn't stop thinking of designs I could make."
She was living in southern California by then, a ripe place for a probation officer to live, one might say. "I ended up leaving the probation department and striking out on my own at just about the end of my twenties. I had a skill; I knew how to do something I could sell. I got a couple of little jobs here and there working for jewelry stores, working for other people making jewelry. 
"After a few years of doing that, I realized: `I can do this. I don't need them to make the work happen for me. I can make this happen.' I'd spent enough time working in a business context that I understood a lot of the main steps you needed to take in order to sell your work. I learned some valuable lessons during that time. It just started out very small."
She has worked in the Ukraine assisting in the creation of Gaia's Gifts, a jewelry design company based in Cherkassy. This was a labor of love, done for the profit of the world and not herself.
The feminine, and business ethics, are both important aspects of Jane Iris Designs. The wonderful part is, her ethics work. She sees no point in being a `shark' in business. "It was important to me to figure out how to do sales and marketing in an ethical way involving contact with people that builds our customer's business as well as our business. If they're succeeding, then we'll succeed. If they're failing, then we cannot succeed. That's the way it happens. The challenge arises, we look at it, we take it apart and try to figure out how to do it in a conscious perspective. It's a challenge to make systems that work for us, and fit into the rest of the world." One suspects it's a challenge she is equal to.
In the summer of 1995 Jane Iris designs released a new line called Kindred Spirits; Jane Sipe's first line for men. About this line she says,
"We were asked for years to produce these kinds of designs for men, so Kindred Spirits was the result of years of conjuring. At first I thought it would be next-to-impossible for me to imagine what such a line would look like. But I found that once I committed my intent to the project, I was easily able to reach inside and contact that part of me just as I have been encouraging men all these years to reach in and make contact with their inner feminine images.
"What I found was that each of the 'masculine' pieces ended up with something of my feminine energy coming through also. So they are a new step for me integrating both parts. You know, it is the 'we are all One' concept making itself visible."
Jane Iris will remain the same company, in spirit and execution, under the Presidency of Sansone. She and Sipe have developed a Jane Iris Designs website at: www.janeirisdesigns.com. To write them an e-mail, the address is: pa@lanz.com
This article provided by <a href="http://www.mediocom/net">MedioCom</a>.