Frances Jenkins Pickens

Frances Pickens has been an artist, educator, and community arts administrator in Hawaii for four decades. For five years after graduating from college, she produced functional crafts like salad servers and bowls, but became unhappy with plastic because of its susceptibility to light and disintegration. Searching for a more permanent material, Pickens turned to metal, developing an “addiction to metalwork” that has shaped her jewelry, sculpture, and hollowware ever since. Pickens creates images of island and marine life inspired by dried turkey bones, the spine of a fish, a rusted tin can, aluminum can pop-tops, and other objects that she considers to have a “beautiful sculptural form.”