Other Voices

Corrina Goutos has this advice for parents, “Let your kids dream so big. Be their safety net.” Goutos, who grew up in Altamont, said her parents did just that for her. Since childhood, she had a love of beauty and a gut need to fight for what is right. She combines both in her art. Goutos lives in Germany now and the jewelry she designs and creates is shown internationally and has won many awards, most notably, she was a finalist in the Art Jewelry Forum for her collection, “Foul Play.” Goutos was inspired when she walked the streets of Berlin on Sunday mornings and saw the “remnants of exuberance” from the night before. She tells in this week’s podcast how she took that “vibrant energy” and turned it to art. Much as in her childhood, playing along the Bozenkill, she’d find trash amid the beauty of nature, Goutos, on the streets of Berlin, would photograph, say, a beer can entwined by a vine. Back at a foundry she built herself, she’d break the rules on casting techniques that she learned at the Savannah College of Art and Design, not using molds but pouring wildly and playing with the metal as it cooled, which she called “completely spontaneous and very liberating.” As her Dutch grandmother taught her as a child to make a dress for her Barbie doll rather than buying one, Goutos values work done with her own hands, eschewing capitalism. “Sales are slow,” she concedes, but she pursues her passion.