The decisive moment for Onofrio's art came in 1989 when she found herself flat on her back after surgery. She started making brooches, collage pieces that included elements such as the charms she had been collecting as far back as junior high school. The brooches led to small shrines, where the brooches could be shown to advantage, and then things ... got bigger. Before she knew it, Onofrio had fashioned a full-scale environmental installation entitled Judyland, like the hillside garden, and first presented at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1993.* In addition to the small wall shrines, there were bigger wall pieces, many featuring elaborately beaded animal heads, still bigger freestanding compotes and, biggest of all, a giant gate topped with bowling balls and tendril forms encrusted with seashells. The installation led to a McKnight Foundation grant and a monumental tour de force: a 20-foot-tall figure covered with bits of mirror, bottle caps, pencils, marbles, keys, plastic fruit, cut-up cookie tins and much, much more.

Stylistically, Onofrio's work might be described as "baroque to the max." Yet for all its wild exuberance, it is carefully designed and beautifully crafted, so that, for example, the colors are subtly balanced throughout each piece. There is clearly a lot of skill and painstaking labor involved; it takes more than a little while to cut hundreds of bottle caps in half and then attach the pieces individually. Onofrio, self-described "demon worker," leads the way, but she does have two assistants who help fill in areas once the materials and pattern have been determined.

Largely self-taught, Onofrio has an adventurous attitude when it comes to trying something nay. That's good, because her work constantly requires trial-and-error development of new techniques. Her animal figures were originally created using taxidermy molds as a starting point. Now Onofrio carves them with a chain saw, that favorite Minnesota sculptural tool, then shapes the surface with more delicate instruments. The snakes that frequently wind around the human figures are made from vines she has gathered in the woods, reinforced with aluminum cable and wrapped in fiberglass.

After a long day, Onofrio goes to an upstairs den and relaxes by beading in a lounge chair next to a kind of shrine/storage unit she made, filled with her bottles of beads. "I'm a bead fanatic," she proclaims, and in this case, the collecting excursions take her to the garment district in New York City, a byzantine realm where the quest goes beyond garage-sale encounters and seems close to the netherworlds of spies or drugs, with elaborate plotting necessary to gain access to "the really good stuff." The results are bracelets that begin with fine beads in a peyote stitch--"I have to wear glasses that make them appear as big as bowling balls"--but are encrusted, in another reminder of her basic collage aesthetic, with larger, gemlike chunks.

Copyright American Craft Council Jun/Jul 1996