Bettina Schneider

Working with metal has been an incredibly joyful and wondrous discovery for Bettina for the past decade. As a child, she was already full of imagination and creative energy, but hadn’t yet found a medium to express it. When she was first introduced to working with metal, her creative side lid up so intensely, that she couldn’t imagine life without it!

Her favorite metal to work with is sterling silver, but she also loves copper and bronze. The fact that those metals can be melted, joined, hammered, folded, sculpted in so many different ways is incredibly exciting to her.

In the past, she has been predominantly doing lost-wax-casting with sterling silver, but recently she has started working with metal clay, which opened up even more possibilities of eternalizing textures and shapes found in nature, or creating abstract pieces of art in one or in a combination of several metals.  She will cast some of her metal clay creations also in sterling silver.

Fascinated by the multitude of shapes and textures that are created by nature, she gets most of her inspirations from nature. Sometimes symmetric, other times random, captivatingly complex or surprisingly simple – they all arouse her creative brain. Her walks and hikes through the Californian landscape excite her and she is always scanning the ground, trees, and trenches for interesting specimens that she wants to see eternalized, abstracted or reinvented in silver. She tries to create pieces that embody hints of these forms, textures, and moods and hopes that people can wear and enjoy them on a daily basis.

She has been a member of ArtSpan for the past 7 years and participates in the Spring/Fall Open Studio events in San Franciso, mostly at 1890 Bryant Studios.