You’ve probably seen April Barber’s artwork and not known it. You might even be wearing her art right now. As I walk into Barber’s home on an afternoon that’s trying to spoil Mother Nature’s promise of spring, she and her daughter, Jasmine, 9, are donning their Earth Day 2003 long-sleeve T-shirts. Barber was one of more than 20 people to submit an entry in the Earth Day artwork contest in December. Her logo won, and it now graces clothing and posters around town.
“How do you feel seeing something you created all over the city?” I ask.
“I’m so proud of myself,” she says. “You know, I do a lot of things, and there’s not anything I’m an expert at, but I realize there are a lot of things I’m really good at, and [the logo] is recognition of that—that my art is something other people appreciate.”
Barber wears glasses that accentuate her already big and plush, round eyes. Her face is also round … and soft, very down-to-earth. She has wispy bangs and light brown hair with dirty blond highlights.
Barber doesn’t usually draw—her medium is recycled copper wire—but she does attend Earth Day every year.
“I’ve just really enjoyed [Earth Day], so I thought it’d be fun to go again this year. I was checking the [Environmental Leadership’s] Earth Day Website to find out when exactly it was going to be. I saw there was a contest, and I just had this idea, ‘Golly, wouldn’t it be neat to have my hands passing the Earth down to my daughter and her hands?’ So, I did it. I thought it can’t hurt to try.”
Barber’s drawing is just what she describes: Earth cradled between a pair of large and small hands. It’s not the typical Earth image. The designs on the round form are patterned in concentric circles, so that the outer circle comprises fish in the ocean, the next circle, land—on which stand different animals to represent each continent—then air, birds, clouds and, in the center, the sun. (You’ve seen this logo on the cover and in the Earth Day supplement in this paper.)
Barber says she plans to take her daughter and a group of her daughter Jasmine’s friends to this year’s Earth Day event in the hope that she can pass on an appreciation of the environment.
Barber’s love of the natural world is reflected in her art. She began taking basketry classes from Great Basin Basketmakers shortly after moving to the Reno area more than seven years ago. She made baskets, purses and more out of pine needles, straw, cedar bark, etc., but nowadays she uses her basketry skills in the not-so-malleable medium of metal (she went to graduate school for metal-smithing). She tries to use primarily recycled copper wire—”It makes me happy to re-use things that other people take for junk.”
Sometimes the wire at the salvage yard isn’t as shiny, wrinkle-free or as fine as Barber needs it to be. So, she also buys coated copper wire, which comes in a variety of colors, and copper cloth. A dainty basket made from copper cloth adorns a shelf in her hallway. The cloth has been sewn together to make the tubular basket shape, and green coated wire has been woven to create an intricate looping pattern. The rim of the basket was created using a technique called knotless knitting. That’s right, Barber actually knits with metal.
“The first basket I made was kind of lop-sided,” she says. “But I think, after that, just because I had a background in art, I could pick up techniques pretty easily and then take and adapt that into what I wanted to do.”
Artistic skill has always come naturally to Barber, as her grandmothers and mother passed on the joys of arts and crafts. Today, she tries to pass these loves on to Jasmine.
“We do our little sewing of Barbie clothes, and Jasmine’s very much into crochet, crocheting all kinds of things you wouldn’t imagine, you know, things for the cats. My mom, when we were little, was so involved in crafts. It got me inspired from an early age, and I hope I’m doing the same thing for my daughter … I think I am. She makes as much art as I do.”