Short version:

I'm an artist currently based in Williamsburg, Virginia. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, I moved to the East Coast in 2020. I’ve been drawing and obsessing over art projects since I was old enough to pick up a pen; in general, I’m just someone with a lifelong compulsion to create art. No matter what job I have at any given time, all I ever want and hope for (aside from the basics like food and love) is more time to get back into the studio.

Long version:

My background is in painting and drawing, but I’ve been most focused on metals and lapidary since sometime around 2013, when I started feeling the impulse to pivot to another medium (at least for a while). After so much time spent toiling against a flat canvas, I yearned to do something three-dimensional, like sculpture, but I also wanted to start producing work that was broadly accessible and, I suppose, more useful to the average person. Around this time, an obliging museum entranced me into the quiet, arcane glow of its precious-adornment exhibit, and everything clicked into place - at the time I’d been frequenting gem shows and dreaming about learning how to cut and polish stones, which dovetailed perfectly into metalwork. Since then I’ve been gradually outfitting my studio, taking lapidary and metal-smithing classes, buying tools as I could afford them, and hashing out pieces whenever time has allowed between work at my “real jobs.” 

Today I’m still most inspired by the jewelry antiquities that I seemed to notice for the first time at the museum that day. Beyond just their timeless design motifs, they are part of an ancient, artisanal tradition that’s still so functionally and spiritually germane today. While, on one hand, from atop their pillowy displays they serve primarily as quotidian proof of bygone opulence, on the other they convey a rarefied quality of hand-hewn craftsmanship, preciousness, and physical endurance in a world increasingly inundated with cheaply-machined products that break easily, seemingly designed to fail; they contrast as testament to what we as humble humans are still so enduringly capable of producing with our own two basic hands: a sensitive language that mass production can’t ever speak. What’s more is how wildly personal these old relics feel despite that their often anonymous creators and owners have long since passed on and vanished from record; a deep presence of humanity emanates from them yet we have no idea who crafted them or (at least in many cases) who wore them; we just know how important and personal they likely were both to their maker and to their wearer. 

All artisanal jewelry today strikes me as a living continuation of this lineage set forth by the antiquities: carefully-crafted precious adornments made to be worn and loved for years, decades, and even centuries to come, long after their makers are gone and forgotten.

To those of you who have bought pieces from me, thank you, from the bottom of my heart (and from the center and the top), for your support. You are the most important part of making my lifelong dream of being an artist come true. I hope you love your jewelry as much as I loved making it.

It probably also goes without saying that I am obsessed with my calico, whose likeness can be found all over this website. I’ve had her since the same year I started learning how to cut rocks and work metal. She was one of my foster kittens. While she does not technically have wings or a head plume as I drew her in my logo, she might as well. She is a supreme queen.