Aug 20

Aug 20 Andrea Haffner

The Myriad Worlds Insider Her Studio

IMAGES PROVIDED BY ANDREA HAFFNER

Every time I step into Andrea Haffner’s Meiners Oaks studio, I feel my whole body relax. Her finished pieces line the walls — delicate flora and fauna encased in resin, framed in small sterling silver or larger steel forms. With a background in both photography and glass, light has always been central to Andrea’s work, which glows subtly in the afternoon light.

I find her work riveting; each piece its own small world. But it’s Andrea’s massive wooden worktable that commands the room. At its center sits a riotous bouquet of dried vegetation, surrounded by seed pods, leaves, shells, stones, and countless other bits of natural material. These are the elements she’s considering for the many works in progress around the table, from her necklaces and earrings to larger sculptural pieces.

HAFFNER’S STUDIO TABLE, BUILT BY **JOHN BUETI** AND **MATT MINOR**

This staging ground is fascinating because you can see the choices she’s making and the astonishing array of delicate natural wonders she has to choose from. The closer you look, the more you realize that each tiny fragment is itself a marvel — something Andrea noticed and collected on her daily walks around Ojai and beyond.

Her collecting began in childhood, in the hardscrabble landscape around her home in Gallup, New Mexico. In what many might see as stark or barren terrain, Andrea found much to explore — from the striations of sandstone cliffs to the transformation of cactus limbs from living plants to dried skeletal husks. When her family moved to the East Coast during her teenage years, she came to understand how deeply the southwestern landscape, with its subtle shades of greens and browns, evokes a feeling of rightness and of home for her. To Andrea, the mixed landscape surrounding Ojai, her home for the past 17 years, feels at once deeply familiar and infinitely inspiring in its variety of natural forms.

VARIOUS COLLECTIONS OF FOUND OBJECTS ON HAFFNER’S STUDIO TABLE

The worktable she designed (created by Ojai’s John Bueti and Matt Minor) has countless cubbyholes, each holding clear boxes filled with natural materials gathered from places she has lived and places she has traveled, as well as treasures people have sent her. She describes her collecting as a practice of observation: she doesn’t search for anything specific, but instead notices what presents itself as she walks.

While her jewelry has long been a signature part of her work, her larger resin wall pieces and her tiny, landscape-like assemblages, often created without resin, are equally elegant and intriguing. I was particularly drawn to an assemblage featuring what looked like a canoe (a seed pod) precariously suspended in delicate twigs. Andrea explained that it reflected how she felt during the isolation of the COVID years.