About the Artist

A number of years ago I was living in suburban Washington DC. I’d been doing some metal sculpture and had taken some sculptural welding classes. I had pieces of jewelry in my head that I wanted to see, looking at shops and galleries, but nobody seemed to be making the kind of things I was envisioning. I was an associate member at the Smithsonian Institution, and they were teaching several jewelry courses. So I signed up. The first thing I learned to do was piercing, and when I first got a jeweler’s saw in my hand I looked at it and thought, “Where have YOU been all my life?” I had unexpectedly found my bliss. I’ve never looked back.

A couple of years later, I moved to the Philadelphia area and married my artist husband. We live in a Twenties- era Mission twin (just the place for two artists; quirky California in a neighborhood of staid colonials and half-timbers), and I have a tiny crowded studio on the second floor with a small balcony off it where I do my product photography.

I use a lot of natural objects in my work, casting twigs and lichen and tiny seed pods and cones in silver. When I walk in the neighborhood or in nearby parks, I always keep an eye out for interesting miniature shapes and textures and often come home with a pocketful of potential jewelry material.

When I first thought about using natural materials, I went through the neighborhood with a ziploc bag and a pair of scissors, rummaging in the neighbors' shrubbery looking for things that branched at a very small scale, but I found my main sources in the blueberry bushes in my back yard and my neighbor’s cedar tree with its tiny cones.