Step into a rare and powerful experience designed to stretch your metalsmithing skills, expand your personal style, and deepen your body of work. This is an invitation to work from your truest place — to dig into your authentic voice and create in a way that feels aligned, rooted, and wholly your own.
Over five immersive days, we’ll dive into the art of building personal sacred objects — wearable talismans, prayer boxes, and totems — through metalwork, storytelling, and sensory exploration. You’ll learn to set unusual stones and embellishments, construct small hollow forms, create symbolic containers, and work with unconventional materials to shape a line of work that rises directly from the heart.
Once your forms begin to take shape, we turn our attention to relationship: how a piece lives on the body. In The Body as Altar, we explore adornment as expansion. You’ll study movement, placement, and the energetic resonance of stone, color, and form. We’ll explore chakra-inspired color frequencies, design jewelry that dances with fringe, horsehair, chain, and sound, and create ritual wear meant for ceremony, protection, and expression. Through hands-on studio practice, you’ll incorporate organic materials, drill and attach fringe, embed stones, and learn to balance design with the body’s natural rhythm and movement.
On Day 4, we shift into Totems — Building the Story, centering connection and structure. This day is devoted to creating multi-component works: wearable totems, stacked symbolic pieces, or larger wall objects that carry personal myth. You’ll explore how symbols speak to one another, how repetition and variation build narrative, and how to integrate found relics, fossils, and objects from your own travels. We’ll dive into advanced riveting, mechanical joins, wire wrapping, patina, oxidation, and surface treatments that bring age, depth, and story to your work — culminating in the assembly of a cohesive totemic structure or mini-collection.
We close in Ceremony + Body of Work — a day of celebration and integration. Here, you refine, reflect, and prepare your pieces for a soft exhibition. It’s a moment to honor what you’ve built, to witness your evolution, and to step forward with clarity about your creative direction and the body of work emerging from your hands.
On the final evening, you’re invited into an optional deep-journey session led by two trained herbalists who work with more than a hundred different plants, tinctures, and earth-based preparations. This is a guided, intuitive process designed to soften the edges, open the inner doors, and help you access whatever wisdom is waiting beneath the surface. It’s held at night, in a safe and intentional container, and offered as an additional experience for those who feel called to explore a deeper layer of their creative and personal alignment.
