the origin story…

I decided after high school that college was the best choice; I had no idea what I wanted to be but I knew even then that I needed discipline. I moved from California back to my home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 2008 and in the winter of 2010 (I took a gap year..and a half…to work in food service) started at Northern Michigan University’s business department with a declared major in accounting. One semester in and I knew this wasn’t the right path for me. It was painfully clear that my short-lived dream of being a successful CPA was not going to pan out, so I defeatedly browsed the university website list of majors in hopes of finding a new path. It was then that I saw the words “art and design”. Art school?! I had always found comfort in craft but never had a specific medium or recognizable style, especially one that could yield a career path. I browsed the alphabetical list of art majors and came across a gallery of photos from the sculpture and metalsmithing department. The blacksmiths forging at their anvils, sparks flying, abstract sculptures proudly displayed with a smile by hard working artists with dirt on their faces. THIS is where I wanted to be! To create in an environment where my peers could give honest critique and I could learn from local artists who have spent decades honing their craft. Without a second thought I switched my major to Metalsmithing.

I learned how to forge iron, how to carve wax and cast it in bronze, how to braze and solder and how to weld. In 2012 I decided to call myself City By The Lake and began incorporating my own personal style into my work. Drawing from aspects of sci-fi and futurism I created my junior thesis project, using silversmithing processes to create a line of jewelry that explored the ideas of light and space. Semi-translucent stones were set in sterling silver with a cut-out that allowed light to shine through the back of the jewelry. I built a color-changing light box that sent a shifting spectrum of light shining through the backs of the pieces, exploring the changing nature of the terrestrial stones with different colored lights. I found humor in the dichotomy of the very human, very earthly aspect of jewelry adornment and creating jewelry that looked like it came from a different planet altogether. My jewelry style was beginning to take shape and my ideas and inspiration were well-received by the panel I was defending my thesis to.

My senior thesis was quite different. I cast a large-scale display of aluminum body parts belonging to imagined beasts: alien heads and hoofed feet, adorned with rubber and plastic jewelry. I can’t say this project was as well-received; a few people understood the work, but most were left confused. This is jewelry? For…aliens? The biggest piece of advice I was given from my advisor before I started this was to not explore a new medium for one’s senior project, to stick with what you know and show people the cumulative skills you’ve acquired in your college career. Of course, I did not listen. I spent hours learning about liquid rubber and experimenting with texture and cutting shapes from cured sheets of the material. I find it hard to do what people say, especially if it seems like my ideas are being stifled. And though I still proudly display the aluminum creatures in my workshop, I wish I would have explored my talents in silversmithing jewelry and continued with the idea of light, space and adornment in human jewelry. I look back and laugh at my bullheadedness now, but that project taught me much about the way people react to an artist’s vision.

To this day I find inspiration on the covers of sci-fi novels and in terrestrial rock and mineral, but I stick to creating jewelry for human beings. I find ways to include nature in my jewelry without being literal; you won’t find flowers and animals or much representational imagery in my jewelry; rather, I find ways to include nature itself into the designs. Setting stones like jasper and agate, texturing metal to look like earth and sand, keeping a telluric, rough texture and evidence of hand-built connections are ways that I keep the Earth in my jewelry.

Follow my timeline of style by browsing my gallery of previous work!

Love and light,

Jaquelyn Lambert

City By The Lake Jewelry