Hi, I'm Laura! I'm an artist, illustrator, and storyteller living in rural Florida, where the pine trees outnumber the people, the wildlife goes about its business without much interest in my opinions, and the natural springs stay cold and clear no matter how brutal the summer gets. I live here with my two dogs, and between the birdsong in the mornings and the breeze moving through the pines, it's a good, quiet place for making things — which is what I've been doing, in one form or another, for as long as I can remember.
When I was three years old and someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was instant: an artist. In my head, this meant selling paintings for people to hang on their living room walls, and did I have any clue how to actually go about that? Not one. But my three-year-old brain knew it had to be possible, because nobody had told me otherwise yet, and that certainty of a small child who hadn't yet learned to wait for permission before creating something has carried me through every winding stretch of this life since.
I believe a life is an anthology of stories, and I believe you get to keep authorship of yours — revising, rearranging, deciding for yourself which memories stay on the bracelet and which ones move to the shadow box, never obligated to send any of it to the printer as a final draft. It's even hiding in the word itself: "charm" comes from the Latin carmen, a song or an incantation, and I love that a word which once meant something sung has drifted, over centuries, into something small you can hold. Words drift like that, and meanings drift, and so do we, and none of that drifting is a flaw to be corrected. The stories change because we're still writing them.
If you spend enough time with my work, you'll notice this belief everywhere — in the essays, in the charms, in the way I keep circling questions about who gets to say what a thing means, or what a person is. I don't believe anyone arrives in this world broken, and I don't believe anyone else holds the pen on your story, and both of those convictions run through everything on this site, from the artwork down to the smallest jewelry finding.
So wander around and stay as long as you like. Browse the artwork, meet the charms, and if the stories pull at you, my Substack is where I tell the longer ones — the memories behind each piece, the winding histories of words and symbols, the happy accidents from a sketchbook full of them. And if something here reminds you of a person, a memory, or a particular Tuesday of your own, that's not a coincidence. That's the whole reason I made it. I make the shape, but the story it holds is yours.