“Keep making, keep experimenting, and never stop yourself from doing something bold because you’re afraid to fail.” This is artist and teacher Christine Clark’s guiding principle. 

Clark, who lives in Portland, Oregon, will teach the first-ever Steel and Mixed-Material Mobiles workshop at Northwind Art School at Fort Worden. The Veterans Day weekend course runs Nov. 10, 11 and 12 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and participants are asked to sign up by Nov. 3 at NorthwindArt.org. 

This is a completely new offering for the nonprofit school, said Kate Lovejoy, Northwind Art’s education director, and Clark is the one to teach it. She is “wildly knowledgeable” about her art form, Lovejoy said. 

Mobiles “are hanging kinetic individuals with balanced, delicate and bold elements flowing around one another,” Clark says. “When the air is still, they find themselves in indeterminate positions – a thousand static possibilities.” 

Clark has designed her Northwind Art School class to welcome beginner to advanced students, ages 15 to adult. She’ll teach them how to use steel wire, mixed materials and found objects to create kinetic mobiles. She’ll also guide them in exploring balance and a variety of dynamic elements, including micro welding wire, jump ring and chain making and ball bearing swivels.

“People seek Christine out as an instructor,” said Lovejoy. “She was recommended by a student at our school, who had taken a class with her. She couldn’t believe how awesome it was.” 

“Christine wants her students to have an incredible experience, and she works really hard to create the situation where that happens,” Lovejoy added. 

Clark’s own mobiles and public art pieces are found across the Pacific Northwest. “Growth, Search, Escape” a hanging sculpture, graces the Evergreen Branch of the Everett Public Library, while “Tribute Baskets” is an outdoor project at the end of the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal. More about the artist can be found at cclarkstudio.com. 

Clark is an educator who urges her fellow artists – at any level – to embrace the new.  

“Find something you’re passionate about,” she says, “and exploit that until your ideas take you on to another new impassioned path.”