My name is Darrien, and I am a jeweler.

However, if you knew me as a young girl, you might not have predicted that. When my parents met in San Francisco in the 1960s, they attended a Grateful Dead concert, bought a boat, and sailed off into the glittering horizon. They took a pitstop in Hawaii for my birth, and I spent my childhood playing with our German Shepherd in the hull of our old wooden sailboat. I had not yet been exposed to art, but I was also sheltered from the normalized, corporate nine-to-five lifestyle—unlike other children, I never had those expectations placed upon me.

Thanks to the counselor’s advise, I attended the Rhode Island Institute of Design (RISD) after graduating high school. There, my conservative private school upbringing was shaken by the vibrant and wild attitude of art students. I floated from major to major, convinced I had to study something practical like advertising, but never fully committing. Then, one summer, I worked as an activities coordinator in RISD’s pre-college program. I met a rising RISD senior who had a one-way ticket for Italy to fulfill his European honors program; he had no intentions to return to New England for his graduation. You gotta do what you love, or you’re not going to be good at it, he told me. 

After graduating from RISD, I veered away from producing for large companies and instead started working part-time for independent jewelers so that I could make progress on my own art. This lifestyle proved exhausting, though. I spent so much energy on other people’s creations that, by the end of the day, I was too drained to even look at my tools. Once I managed to begin participating in wholesale shows and selling to galleries, the economy took a turn for the worse, and I needed to search for a more stable source of income. 

Now, I fabricate all forms of jewelry, from casting objects to upcycling family heirlooms. The overwhelming theme is that of nature; my dedication to the natural world evolved from an original necklace I made from silver-cast mangrove flowers I had collected from my mother’s dock in Florida. I love taking the shapes and textures around me—which coincidentally are often ocean imagery—and subtly immortalizing both them and their moments of discovery into rings, earrings, and necklaces: the rough shell of a sea urchin; a tooth from a six-foot barracuda my father caught in the Bahamas.