Some little girls string elbow macaroni together to make a necklace, while others make butterfly brooches out of mussel shells. Still others salvage gilded buttons discarded by their mothers and make them into charm bracelets.
Pia was shopping in Robinson’s Galleria one afternoon four years ago when she was fascinated by the flat, shiny glass marbles she saw on display. "I wanted to wear them, they were so pretty," she recalls. "I love glass, the way it catches the light."
Pia mount these flat marbles and wore them on a chain. Remembering that copper wire was the most malleable material she could twist into various shapes, she bought some of the marbles that so entranced her and asked for a length of copper wire from a friend.
"I just sat on my bed, got a roll, got a stone," she says of her first efforts, which resulted in a necklace. She later made a couple of pieces, which she sold to friends during her first year in college.
Since then, she has created hundreds of items–ranging from armbands that explode in a spray of "flowers" to necklaces that wrap seductively around a woman’s neck without a clasp to hold them in place –all of these rendered out of objects that catch her eye.
Pia has used buttons, marbles, five-centavo coins and other items she finds around the house. She has no interest in semi-precious stones and is "more intrigued by everyday things that you don’t usually find in jewelry."
She herself does not wear jewelry too often, but is drawn to objects that stand out because of their bright colors, interesting shapes and textures, or "weird" materials.
"You won’t usually catch me in a pair of dainty diamond studs or simple chains and pendants. I like things to be unpredictable. I like things to be a little off," she says.
Pia has rolls of copper wire in different thicknesses sitting in a basket she keeps beside her when she works. She uses the thick ones to sketch the basic form of the piece she is creating, while the thin ones are shaped into the fine, intricate textures that give her pieces depth and dimension.
Her creative process, it seems, is mostly subconscious: "I just follow where the wire goes."
In her second year at Ateneo de Manila University–she graduated last March with a degree in Communications–Pia found she had no money to buy her boyfriend a gift for his birthday. She set to work, making and selling enough of her copper wire accessories to buy her boyfriend a few days’ vacation in Puerto Galera.
Pia participated in a few bazaars during her third year, but grew tired of them because she had to make a minimum of 100 pieces for each bazaar.
"I did some wholesaleing. I don’t want to mass produce, do one small piece over and over again. I want to make every piece very special," she says. Pia also never produces duplicate pieces–each piece is one of a kind–and, while she loves working with copper wire to create her wearable art, she is now setting her sights on broader horizons in refining her craft.
"My first priority right now is to learn more techniques… I’d like to find a sculptor who would be willing to take me in as an apprentice," she says. Pia would like to work with gold and silver, but is more interested in working with recycled materials.
"Maybe some old electronics parts, metal scraps, or whatever I can find. I have a jewelry-making book where I saw a necklace made of laminated paper–it was beautiful! I’m intrigued by stuff like that," she admits, adding that she wants to learn how to solder and, later, attend a glass-blowing class and make her own glass someday.
In the meantime, Pia is working out consignment deals with some stores and has received requests for custom made jewelry.
"Two people have asked me to create huge body pieces, which is going to be a fun challenge. I don’t plan to go full-time with this, however. Creating these pieces is what I do to get away from everything else. I don’t want it to become everything else, you know? So I’m trying to be careful not to let myself get either too excited or too overwhelmed," she says.
Pia’s room, where the interview and pictorial are held, testifies to her talent. The door leading to her closet has a curtain made of string and glass leaves she salvaged from an old ornamental fixture that was falling apart. Other "strands" are decorated with bright ceramic miniatures of the sun, moon and stars.
From the ceiling in the middle of her room, Pia has hung mobiles that dance in the wind. Her flat marbles and rolls of copper wire sit in bright piles in rattan baskets, along with a pair of long-nose pliers and a wire cutter.
"What I love most about what I do is the feeling of giving birth to something that was conceived only in my imagination–to dream of something and then physically make it real, with my own hands. It’s exhilarating and therapeutic. We so rarely let our imaginations run wild–this is my outlet for doing that," she says.
While none of her relatives are artists for a living, her parents and sister all have inclinations for the arts.
"My sister is a professional ballerina, a soloist with Ballet Manila. My dad has always been inclined to visual arts like drawing and painting, while my mother taught me to love theater and literature," she shares.
Her parents are both doctors: Her father is an internist, specializing in nephrology, while her mother stopped practicing to take care of their family. Pia’s mother is now taking her master’s degree in hospital administration at the University of the Philippines, Manila campus.
Pia attributes her talent for crafting copper wire pieces to her early exposure to the arts. Origami, the Japanese art of paper-folding, developed her spatial awareness.
"I grew up in the United States and the grade school I went to had a great library full of ‘how to’ books including some drawing and origami books. I guess I must’ve borrowed one of the origami books one day and just took to it. I remember making ‘Chinese fortune tellers’ for my classmates back in second grade. I don’t know what interested me about it – I just found it naturally fun, and I seemed to have the ability to follow it. I could follow the directions in the book really well," she recalls.
She is also interested in film and has done production design for a few short films and music videos. While she has already directed one of her own, Pia is still "pretty new at it. Right now I’m just trying to watch as many films as I can, to learn as much as I can."
Art aside, one of Pia’s other passions is protecting the environment. "When I was still in school, I spent a lot of time working with the environmental desk of our student government. I led the cycling advocacy program. I’d eventually like to get a day job at an environmental non-government organization."
In the meantime, copper wire, beads and other objects populate Pia’s wired and wonderful world.