About Caitlin Albritton Jewelry
“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong,”
-Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher
When I first read this quote, I felt deep parallels to a woman’s inner strength. Like the quiet introspection reflected in a trickling stream, there is strength in a gentle meditative magnitude that doesn’t appear powerful at first glance.
This is why I make art jewelry that inspires creative curiosity (and even healing) with my tiny talismans of inner strength.
Merging Passions of Rockhounding and Painting
Pictured is Caitlin Albritton screening for sunstones at Spectrum Sunstone Mine near Plush, Oregon in 2017.
Growing up in Florida, pirate and treasure lore is steeped into the Tampa community. When my parents took me to the to the Mel Fisher Museum where you could touch a golf bar found from the Atocha shipwreck, I became so enamored with it that my parents spray painted landscape rocks gold to hide in the sandbox.
That excitement of finding those pieces of “gold” was the start of my love of treasure hunting.
And not just man-made treasures, but treasures of the Earth as well! No vacation went without us looking for the local gem or mineral along the way.
Pictured is a painting from my Gym Series: Bicycle Crunches, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.
From high school through undergrad, I suffered from an eating disorder that was close to putting me in the hospital. Because of that, I’ve been drawn to making paintings about the body to come to terms with the disharmony between brain and body, and painting was always a meditative way to tell my stories and reflect on my thoughts through color.
I’ve since healed, but I still make work about the body but in a positive way that reminds me of the strength it took to get out of that dark place.
Fast forward years after receiving my BFA (Savannah College of Art and Design) and MFA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in painting, I received a grant to learn inlay and intarsia—techniques found in Native American jewelry that inspired me—so I could intertwine my love of both painting and rockhounding into wearable art pieces made out of silver and hand-cut stone.
My Signature: Female Figurative Inlay Jewelry
When I first started making figurative inlays, they depicted an outer strength with my earlier Rock Solid Bodies Collection of gym ladies that stemmed from a series of gym paintings.
I soon became much more interested in portraying inner strength and what that may look like. It started with yoga-esque figures before I realized that there can be meditation and inner reconciliation in little, quiet reflective moments, too.
The curvaceous silver work, organic-shaped stones, and careful stone color palette selection are signature elements of my figurative jewelry. Instead of hinting at emotions through facial clues like most figurative artists, I use body language—paired with symbolism through color and stone—to radiate feminine strength, independence and inner passions.
What is inlay jewelry?
Inlay is a jewelry technique where silver walls are constructed before semi-precious stones are cut to fit into these spaces.
This is different from typical jewelry settings, which are designed to fit around the stone.
In most stone settings, metal is pushed down over a stone to hold it in place. Inlay artists cut their stones carefully to create a tight fit; these pieces are then glued in place with a water-clear, high-strength epoxy.