Founding Member
Ramona Hotel
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| Background: | Ramona Hotel was born in Dayton Ohio as Donna Ellen Phillips;
mother from Harlan County, Kentucky and father from Langdale, Alabama. After a
tour in the military, in an Appalachian backlash the family settled in California,
where little did they know that as the 60's were about to happen, and their only
child then a pre-teen would never be the same again. Basically I had everything I needed and wanted in California, got a pretty good education, grew up, lived through sex, drugs and rock 'n roll with a flower in my hair, and as an adult considered the west coast my home by default. But the best memories of my life were of times I had spent with my grandmother in Loyall, a small community in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky where the children made toys of cast offs, played house in the wood shed, recycling was not yet a word but making-do a necessity, and the sooty, decrepit nature of everything never denied the love that was present. I have worked in collage and assemblage using appropriated imagery and found materials, but my bottle cap interest began about 1987. It was then that I had an epiphany at the drive-in movie lot flea market where I discovered the ground to be littered with many years of discarded bottle caps in every stage of decomposition. Having an affinity for the beauty of rust, the casually discarded and valueless object, and a make-do attitude, I knew I had come upon something that would be important to me. At first I used the rusty bottle caps in my collage and assemblage work making a transition over several years toward the use of more recently discarded caps. In 2000 I began to make the character pins where the color and logos on the bottle caps often are important to the character and humor of the piece. I love making the characters and I relate to the making as when creating my own paper dolls as a child, giving them whatever face I wanted and dressing them. I want to make the art wearable, to be displayed and used by the wearer, to be a conversation piece, to be humorous, to help the wearer establish personal identity, and to make a statement. My hope is that they bring a smile to those who wear them and those who view them. I found myself in a situation several years ago where I realized I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted to do. I closed a business I had for 22 years and left California. Since then I have been sort of a recluse, and currently reside and make art deep in the mountains of western North Carolina, up in the hills, out in the sticks, in a place "you can't get to from here". |
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