in ebony. He also used plastic as a substitute for wax in casting. Making casts of some of the detritus of American consumerism led to critical acclaim, museum collections and stature as one of the country's foremost found-object artists.

The first found-object pieces concerned recycling. Woell had been in the scouts as a kid and appreciated the environment. He watched the proliferation of packaging, with America as a throwaway society—dumps turned into new artificial mountains. He could not stand the blatant trashing of the planet and went out of his way to find artistic uses for what others tossed.

Woell's work was frequently political. Nixon was the subject of a large unflattering cast head—an effigy of sorts—made around 1970. Critics have tried to relate the aesthetic to Pop Art, but his jewelry is not about reproducing Campbell soup cans or frames from a comic book. It is rather more sardonic and subtle.

One of the special pleasures offered by Woell's art derives from moments of recognition. You realize with a start that the piece you are studying features a cast of a miniature set of McDonald's golden arches or a plastic pilot's wings airlines give to children or the head of Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. They have been transformed yet retain their cultural resonance.

Found objects continue to attract Woell, who accumulates all manner of bric-a-brac, some of it given to him by friends (he has had to put a halt to this beneficence for storage reasons). A variety of coins, including Indian head nickels and mercury dimes, appear in a number of his pieces, sometimes cast in place, sometimes attached by a cold connection, often bent or otherwise rusticated (Woell's term for giving personality to an object through burning or some other disfiguring process).

Stones are another recurring element in the metal pieces. Unlike the traditional design meant to show off the individual diamond or ruby, Woell uses quartz or a brick fragment as part of the organic whole. At times, this element stands out, as a moonstone does in a recent piece —"blatant," the artist calls it. A new work, "Star Power" incorporates .22 bullet shells. They are "nice decorative accents," Woell says, but they also add to the statement the piece makes.

Woell's presentations are subtle, yet engaging; he prefers substance over flash. Indeed, he states that he does not much like jewelry, the sole purpose of which is to show off one's wealth and prestige. A lot of expensive ornaments, in his opinion, lack interest, although the best of them have personality, and he often admires the engineering that requires intricate settings.

Brass switch plates recovered from a gutted building in Boston serve as a foundation for a series of pendants, with photo-etched plates, a miniature pocketknife and other elements affixed to them. "I find that the discards of our culture tell stories," Woell says. Some of his objects bring to mind the magical assemblages of Joseph Cornell.

Embarking on a new piece, Woell often does not know ahead of time what he will use—he sorts and studies, and soon "things add up." His goal is to make the final assemblage of objects into something more than just a collection of identifiable items.

Sometimes Woell sets a time limit in order to fire up the creative juices. He practices this method with his students, too, getting them to create quickly: "We're only together for a weekend or a week," he explains. As a teacher, he proposes ways of jump-starting the process, of not getting bogged down with sketches, of trying to make the perfect design. "At my best," Woell says, "I help my students find their own voices."

Inspiration sometimes comes from unusual quarters. An admirer of early commemorative spoons that celebrated centennials and elections, Woell wondered how a contemporary version of such an object might appear. He subsequently created his own marvelous versions with handles that feature odd amalgams of cast found items from the discard pile. The spoons seem to have had some kind of magic spell cast on them, undergoing a transformation worthy of a wizard in Harry Potter.

Serendipity is a word Woell often utilizes when speaking of his art. Whereas early in his career pieces were planned with great precision, he came to recognize the beauty of the accidental and the expressive character of imperfections. The latter lesson he learned in the Champaign-Urbana studio of world-renowned sculptor Frank Gallo. When Gallo took a torch to the smooth epoxy resin surface of one of his figures or