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As a child, Madeleine Yates’s creative, non-confrontational parents boarded a sailboat with their children and spent six years exploring the South Pacific. Her father, a photographer and filmmaker, and her mother, who ran an art gallery, eventually settled in Australia. But even then, life was hardly conventional. Their home had a “space room”, an all white, circular room with porthole windows. The family dined in the “tree room”, which had a eucalyptus tree sprouting through a hole in the floor. Yates was constantly creating art projects (encouraged by her parents) which filled the house along with late sixties furnishings.
By the time she finished art school in Sydney, where she studied photography and printmaking, she still hadn’t discovered her preferred medium. She traveled to Italy for a year to study the language. For her own amusement and to earn a little extra cash, she started making simple wire earrings. Soon she was hooked on jewelry making. She studied silversmithing for three years and worked in a jazz club at night.
Yates apprenticed with a Santa Fe jeweler to hone her skills. She then moved to San Francisco and started her own jewelry design studio. “I’ve always had a lust for color”, she says. Blending sorbet colors with clean, minimalist design, each piece of “I-kandee”, is Retro inspired. Maddy’s collection is handcrafted fine silver overlaid with unusual color combinations of resin. Color can sooth, energize and simply satisfy a craving for spontaneity of life.
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