Interview by Ariella Har-Even

Hi Lauren! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat about you, your creative practice, background, and interest in jewelry and collecting!

Thank you so much for having me, I’m happy to be here!

To start, please tell us a little about yourself and your jewelry.

Sure! I’ve been interested in art for as long as I can remember, mainly filling little journals with drawings and doodles as a kid and taking all of the art classes I could throughout high school. It wasn’t until college that I tried metalsmithing and jewelry for the first time, and even then, I almost quit because it was so hard! Having practiced one method of making for my whole life, I had no idea what I was getting into. I loved it, though, and looking back, I can see a lot of similarities between my illustration and early jewelry work. Now with the experience I've gained, the jewelry I enjoy making consists of utilizing traditional techniques, clean lines and finishes, simple bezels wrapped around natural gemstones, and low-profile wearability. I love making jewelry and being a jeweler!

I’m really interested in the way you speak about the progression of your creative endeavors, sort of viewing it as a lifelong journey. Can you tell us more about how your childhood dreams of paleontology turned over time to teenage years spent collecting and displaying, which then led you to pursue a career as an artist exploring material? How do you see these all still connecting in your current work?

Yes, anything that has to do with art and the way I interact with it will always be a lifelong endeavor (and I secretly love it). And I definitely do owe that to the curious little kid that wanted to be a paleontologist, digging and exploring in the dirt. Like many other artists will say, I do use art as a way to process and interact with the outside world, so I’m finding that as an adult I still want to interact with the same things I enjoyed as a child. There was nothing more exciting than unearthing a precious little object from its hiding spot, whatever it was, so now it’s almost like I use tools, techniques, and materials I’ve collected to create new, precious artifacts that I would want to collect as a kid. It’s so funny; I’m still a collector of material and found objects, but through this artistic progression, I’ve also become a collector of techniques, processes, tools and materials and all the ways to use them, and it’s addictive! Each nugget of new information is like a sparkly little gem dug from the ground, and there’s SO much to explore!!

Another thing that fascinated me in your statement was referring to the human body as a display case, or a “personal curio cabinet”. Can you elaborate on this analogy of the body as a museum-like fixture?

I’m a strong believer that the human body lives to be adorned!!! I really explored the body as a curio cabinet in undergrad, and it helped to change my perspective quite a bit about how traditional jewelry objects can be displayed. For example, instead of setting a gemstone directly into the prongs of a ring, I would keep the gemstone in its gem box (small plastic box with a velvet pillow and glass window for viewing), and set the whole box containing the stone into the ring. I really enjoyed how the stones looked in the tiny boxes, and having collected them over the years, it was important to me to include and display them in the finished piece. And that’s the thing: we have a human impulse to display objects that we find beautiful, interesting or intriguing, so why not use the human body for the same purpose? I studied 18th century curio cabinets while completing my thesis, and honestly, the human body is the perfect vehicle to hold and display lots of the same objects and oddities! It’s amazing, and even better, portable!

You received your BFA from the Maine College of Art in 2018. Did you have any mentors along the way, or maybe since graduation, that really helped you carve your career path or keep pushing?

Oh yes, of course! I owe nearly everything I know to a few people, most importantly, my professors from MECA, Sharon Portelance and Kyle Patnaude. I came to them as an angsty and inexperienced teenager, and I left their fine graces with real and momentous drive to keep learning as much as I possibly could. Truly, I owe everything to those two, and I’m grateful for everything they’ve taught me. After graduating, I started working as a bench jeweler’s assistant for a jeweler in South Portland, Chaya Caron, and she greatly influenced the path I wanted to begin taking in the field, which was to start a business. Chaya is also a MECA alumni, and runs/owns a full-time jewelry business that she started from the ground up, so that was very inspiring to me. My experience with her really taught me about production lines, custom work, pricing, websites, and sustaining a successful business in the long run. I hadn’t personally begun to touch upon or even think about these things in school, so working with her and learning that transition was absolutely crucial for me!

Tell us more about the way you approach materials in your pieces. You work in enamel, lost wax casting, and fabrication, to name a few methods. Do you find that you gravitate more to exploring materials or processes?

That’s a tough question because I’m obsessed with both material and process, and I see them being influenced by one another. In undergrad, I definitely found myself letting material dictate the process of making, mainly because I had the means of taking any material I wanted, and manipulating it virtually any way I could. I wasn’t limited to what I could do, so that was definitely a huge perk of having a fully stocked and maintained studio space provided by school! Now, however, I’m very much confined to what I’m able to produce in a small home studio, so limited access to certain processes has been dictating what materials I’ve been using. There are some new materials I would like to start working with moving forward, though, including gold and precious gemstones, so that will be part of my next material exploration!

I’m wondering about your experience working at an estate jewelry business after graduating from MECA, and how that possibly expanded or enriched your views on jewelry.

My experience in estate jewelry is actually one of the biggest influences I can recognize in my own work (and goals) currently. Not only did I gain invaluable information about gemstones, metal purities, time periods and jewelry styles, I also got to literally hold, observe, examine, and study handcrafted jewelry dating back to the early 1800s. It was absolutely mind blowing to see classic and traditional techniques and materials combined so beautifully, and standing the test of time, all right in front of me to learn from directly. It really romanticized jewelry for me, and I fell in love with it again in a new light. I currently pull influences from Victorian jewelry and the time period in general, specifically because of how romantic and sentimental and morbid it is; I truly just love it. Once I begin working exclusively in gold, I will be exploring this influence even further!

Has there been an evolution of techniques, or departure from certain processes in your creative practice over the last few years, or have you been honing in?

There has certainly been an evolution of technique over the years, mainly due to the limitations of a home studio mentioned previously. I’m very glad I chose to explore a very broad range of techniques before leaving school because I’ve been able to take quite a few with me without too much interruption. In a small space, I can still solder small objects, enamel with a torch instead of a kiln, wax carve for casting (I have found a great local casting company to send my waxes to!), finish/polish with my flex shaft and small magnetic tumbler, and fabricate most small jewelry items I was able to complete while in school! I don’t create work exactly how I used to with every tool and piece of equipment at my disposal, but learning to adapt is important, and can be fun and more cost effective! Working with a production jeweler after school also helped me devise a realistic studio setup with just the necessary tools, offering more creative ways to make the same work!

Speaking of making changes, I’m wondering how the pandemic has affected your creative practice? Have you experienced shifts in your making, selling, or exhibiting processes since 2020?

The pandemic, strangely enough, gave me the opportunity to be at home making work, and I completed my first ever body of work since graduating undergrad in 2018. I hit this little creative streak as I was moving into a new job at Day’s Jewelers in the fall of 2020, so that initial little streak didn’t last very long but it generated something much longer term, I think. I didn’t continue this specific body of work because it was time consuming and not cost effective by any means, but it was the first time I had actually picked up a tool and made anything at all, so that was absolutely huge for me. I’m still, and forever will be, in the process of making work, starting and running a business, learning new skills, collecting tool after tool, and all around just learning to be the most genuine maker I can be, but if it wasn’t for being forced to stay home last summer, I probably would not be writing this right now!

Finally, any pearls of wisdom to share with emerging artists who are either about to graduate, or have just recently made the transition from a school setting to a professional one?

YES, of course, so here it is: be patient with yourself. My professor, Sharon, once told me that she didn’t make a single piece of work or touch a piece of metal until 2-3 years after she graduated, and she is by far one of the most successful, established and published jewelers in the industry that I know of. So I took her advice and did the same because that’s how I was feeling after graduating, and I’m so glad I did. I needed time to recover from school and season myself so I could enter my next phase as an artist! You don’t realize how truly taxing it is to create assignment/prompt based work for 4 years straight, so it’s okay to give yourself a break to do absolutely nothing! You will know when you’re ready to get back at it, and trust me, it will feel awesome and new and fresh and full of all the things you loved about it before. It’s cliché, but seriously: trust the process.