Jessica deGruyter is a self-taught artist and metal-smith learning her craft through workshops, books, and experimentation with unusual materials. She opened her Etsy shop, Found: in Albuquerque in 2010, and began setting up at small markets and pop-ups around New Mexico. In 2014, she quit her day job in order to pursue the life of a full-time artist. Jessica’ work has been published in Belle Amore Jewelry Magazine (Winter 2017, Spring 2018), and she was recently invited to exhibit at the American Craft Council Show in St. Paul, MN for the first time in 2018.

I work with a variety of traditional jewelry making tools, including my grandmother’s acetylene torch and chasing stamps handmade from rebar remnants; but I delight in using unusual materials, like acrylic rescued from the waste stream, fascinating and collectable gem and mineral specimens, and wing and petal that show signs of a life well lived. Multi-layered and multi-colored vitreous enamel surfaces evoke the chimerical nature of the sky or the landscape, as I layer about 15 different enamel colors onto a single piece, kiln-firing the sugary powder into a hard glossy surface at a very hot 1450 degrees Fahrenheit. The results are always delightful, and sometimes surprising.

Each of Jessica’s works is a modern-day curiosity cabinet, meant to display an object and to hold space for memory. Link bracelets circle in a continuity of story; cuff bracelets converse over the space of the wrist. Mismatched earrings explore the tension between mirror image and facsimile, challenge our ideas about the value of symmetry, and invite us to consider the balance maintained between partners. What is one without the other?”