Lisa-Marie Armstrong
I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember, and then some. At three years old on the Oregon coast, I saw orange agates in the sand and couldn’t leave them there. They looked exactly like candy. I know now what they were, agates, tumbled smooth by the Pacific, lit from inside by their own geology. I have been collecting stones ever since.
At five I received my first sewing kit. At eight I sewed my cousin a dress. At thirteen, a dear friend brought me into a jewelry making room at Santa Barbara High School and guided me through my first sterling silver ring. I started turning shells and stones into jewelry and selling them not long after.
The obsession never left. It just grew.
I spent decades in luxury fashion, studying design in California, managing iconic brands in Germany and Switzerland, learning at close range what separates a beautiful object from a significant one. Later I worked with women one-on-one as an image consultant, watching them discover themselves in a mirror. I understood then what I understand now: the pieces you choose are declarations of who you are. What you wear is how you show up in the world before you say a single word.
All of it led here.
In 2017 I picked up an amethyst I had carried since I was eight years old and had a vision, clear, specific, impossible to ignore. I tested a sculptural technique using that stone and a bronze chain from an old broken belt. That became piece number one, made in Switzerland. From there I made a collection. My dear friend Karin gave me an event to show them. I sold almost everything. That was the sign.
My studio sits near Pfäffikon, on the Obersee of Lake Zurich. I work with real stones, handworked metals, sculptural techniques I taught myself. Nothing is cast from a mold. Nothing is made twice. I don’t work toward perfect, the crack in a stone, the asymmetry of an organic form, the roughness of something found rather than manufactured, that’s where the beauty lives.
This is powerful personal adornment. Not decoration. Not jewelry for its own sake. Pieces that speak for you, because they were made to.
One piece. One person. Then it’s gone.
If something here feels like it was made for you, it probably was. It just took a lifetime of making to get there.
— Lisa-Marie, Obersee, Lake Zurich