Laura Bracken
Laura’s studio is located in a small rural town in northern California. That is where she creates everything you see in her online store. She designs and hand-fabricate each piece from raw metal and other materials. Jewelry, an expression of our personal selves, has two transformative properties that captivate her. The first is when the artist transforms metals, glass, and other objects into the jewelry in the first place. Being able to take a design idea and translate it from the mind to the hands to the material breathes life into her work. The second transformation takes place when someone wears the jewelry that speaks to them. It’s like wearing a little bit of your personality on the outside where people can get a glimpse of the inner you in a subtle way. She strives to create jewelry that is eye-catching without being ostentatious. She thinks good jewelry tells a story and she wants that story to pass on from her mind to her hands, into the materials. This continues as the customer wears the jewelry and gets to talk about it with interested viewers.
She enjoys making jewelry in the tradition of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 1800’s, when one person made a piece of jewelry from start to finish using a very hands-on approach. She thinks making jewelry this way, using time-honored as well as contemporary techniques, gives the piece not only the expected high level of quality but adds that bit of story-telling necessary in our personal accessories. She is preoccupied with the idea that nothing enters our planet and nothing leaves our planet, yet the things at our disposal are constantly being transformed from one shape, design, function, and aesthetic to another. It’s like no one OWNS anything… we’re all just borrowing things from the planet, they pass throu
gh our hands after a certain length of time and move on to another person and eventually another concept. When creating, she takes into consideration design, balance, wearability, comfort, and durability.
Her designs cycle through the exploration of a variety of techniques, from enamel to etching, metal clay, forging, wire work, fusing, polymer clay, and many others. She is constantly challenging herself to learn more and grow as an artist. Although one of her core beliefs is that change is inevitable and good, there are still a few design motifs that are personal favorites of mine including her line influenced by ancient artifact jewelry and my line influenced by Japanese minimalism. She is the founder and president of the international organization for Self-Representing Artists in Jewelry Design. The SRAJD designation is reserved for those artisans and craftspeople who create and sell their own work. When you buy from an SRAJD member, you are showing support of the artist directly.
