How Two Worlds Shaped My Wearable Art Jewelry

From the Oregon Coast to the Luxury Houses of Europe — How Two Worlds Shaped My Wearable Art Jewelry Studio.

I was four years old the first time I understood that a stone could stop me completely. Little did I know that this was the beginning of my path towards creating wearable art jewelry.

It happened at Manzanita, on the Oregon coast — one of the most dramatic stretches of shoreline I have ever stood on. Behind you, redwoods and the dark rise of Neahkahnie Mountain. In front of you, the Pacific — and rising out of it, stone monoliths that have been standing there since thousands of years. It is the kind of place that makes you feel simultaneously very small and completely alive.

Among the pebbles on that shore I found agates. Small, sand-washed, slightly transparent — and a shade of orange so vivid and particular that my first instinct, I will admit, was to put one in my mouth. They looked exactly like candy. I was convinced, with my four year old mind, that they might taste like it. They didn’t, of course. But I filled a pocket with them anyway and carried them home like treasure because that is exactly what they were.

That feeling of being stopped by something small and extraordinary, of needing to pick it up and understand it has never left me. The stones have just gotten more interesting.

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Twenty-five years later I was standing in the couture showroom of one of the most extraordinary luxury fashion houses in Europe.

I was surrounded by things that represented the absolute pinnacle of what human hands and human vision can produce- fabrics woven by specialists, cuts obsessed over for months, objects of such considered beauty that being in the same room with them felt like a privilege. I secretly cried tears of joy and disbelief that a regular person like me was touching one of these iconic works. I had worked my way to this point through design studies in California, through years of learning the industry from the inside, through a determination to understand beauty not as a concept but as a craft.

And I realized, standing there, that what I was feeling was exactly what I had felt on that beach in Oregon as a four year old.

The same recognition. The same need to understand how something so beautiful had come to exist. The same certainty that the people who made this had been paying a particular kind of attention that most people never quite manage.

These two worlds – the stones and the fashion houses – have run in parallel my entire life. Most people who find me through the jewelry don’t know about the fashion years. Most people who know me from fashion don’t know about the studio, the bench covered in clay and stones and creative beauty, the pieces that have been waiting for the last bit of intuitive inspiration.

What I learned in decades at the luxury level of the fashion industry – in showrooms, in fitting rooms, inside the closets of hundreds of women as an image consultant – is that what we wear is never purely aesthetic. It is how we communicate who we are before we say a single word. It is the most personal form of nonverbal language most of us will ever develop.

And what I learned from a lifetime of picking up stones is that the things that stop us, the things we feel compelled to hold and examine and eventually keep, are never random. They tell us something about ourselves that we already knew but hadn’t quite found the words to express it.

My jewelry sits at the intersection of those two things. It is made from real stones, worked by hand, very individual and strictly one-of-a-kind. But it is also built with the understanding – earned over a very long career- of what it means for a woman to put something on her body and feel, finally, completely herself.

That is what I make things for.

The child on the beach at Manzanita knew it first. She was just waiting for the rest of life’s story to catch up.

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Lisa Marie Armstrong makes one-of-a-kind wearable art jewelry from her studio on Lake Zurich. Each piece is built from raw crystals and stones and worked by hand — made once, never repeated.