Lesley Aine Mckeown Volume 45.4
EPSILON BROOCH of intarsia by Steve Walters (carnelian, Trapiche amethyst, quartz, twenty-four karat gold Keum-boo foil, sterling silver foil, mother of pearl) set in sterling silver, twenty-four karat gold Keum-boo, yellow sapphire, 7.6 x 6.4 x 1.0 centimeters, 2022. Photographs by the artist except where noted.
LESLEY AINE MCKEOWN. Photograph by Christopher Marchetti.
Lesley Aine McKeown is an avowed rockhound. She finds wonder in the “vast array of beautiful materials that come from the earth,” and once described herself as “completely in thrall to the magic of dendrites.” She was born in Missouri, then in 1979, as a teenager, moved to Sedona, Arizona, where her parents opened the craft gallery Gifted Hands, running it for twenty-eight years. Her parents, Deanne (a renowned sculptor) and Byron (who was best known for his handmade knives and walking sticks), both graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute and raised their daughter in a creative environment “that allowed [her] to grow” and ask questions.
In 1980, McKeown began a three-year apprenticeship with Jerome-based jeweler Jed Deutschman (whom she met while bartending), and in 1984 she opened her own studio. She never pursued an academic degree, instead learning from fellow artists, teaching herself and avoiding student debt. She now guides others on their jewelry journeys, offering workshops on contemporary jewelry design with a focus on personal expression. “Most of the people I teach are coming to it later in life, and they are coming with a lot of baggage, and mostly it’s women. And a lot of us are damaged. Art is a way to feel strong. It’s a place where we are safe, and it’s ours.” She helps her students access and express their own voices to produce honest, original work.
McKeown emphasizes that she follows the tradition of the postwar American Studio Art Jewelry Movement, with each piece designed and crafted solely by her in a studio using conventional techniques and tools. She relies on her sketchbook to work out ideas, often cuts her own stones, and finds “the sensuousness of manipulating metal…incredibly addictive.” She loves her studio, with its hardwood paneled ceiling, abundant skylights and big windows looking out onto the small fishpond and lovingly tended gardens in her backyard. “It’s a... groovy space.” Her bench belonged to her father, who made jewelry when she was young; he crafted it in 1966 from scrap wood pallets, then used it for several decades before giving it to her. “It is very dear to me.” Most of her tools were his as well.
McKeown lives and works in Prescott, Arizona, in the high desert and appreciates the “very beautiful” surrounding environment, with areas of pine trees, scrub desert, chaparral, and lakes. In a panel discussion at the Natural History Institute in conjunction with the exhibition “Written in Stone—Natural History Through the Jeweler’s Eye,” she stated, “The natural world is a wellspring of inspiration.”
Over the decades, McKeown’s style has evolved—sometimes showing Southwestern influences, sometimes with references to nature—but generally she creates modern forms in silver with unusual stones. She is interested in the problem-solving aspects of creating complex structures and enjoys “the challenge of a complicated design.” McKeown is particular about her stone selections, explaining that she tries “to keep [only] one to two degrees of separation between the stone, where the stone came from, who cut it, and me.” A lively description by online British jewelry aficionado The Museum of Alternative Jewellery conveys the excitement of her design choices, raving about her “minimalist-abstract…works that collide fiery boulder opals with…satellite dish formations of polished silver, positively CUBIST pendants of mixed metals spliced with untamed, grungy rock formations and hyper-stylized astrological orreries in ghostly dendritic agate with orbiting planets of gold and cut peridot.”
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LESLEY AINE MCKEOWN’S BENCH in her studio.
McKeown’s Neo-Paleo brooch includes a fern fossil with small gold-lined cups suggesting floral growth, like a posey pin from ancient history. The angular Orion brooch/pendant shows her inclination to be a builder, to compose a deceptively simple structure with flat abstract shapes; the rich blue lapis lazuli, with its rough cut echoed in the textured areas of silver, suggests the night sky and its constellations. Like Orion, the brooch/pendant Rift touches on one of McKeown’s passions—space. She went to her first Star Trek convention at age twelve, and such fantasy worlds have provided numerous design and title inspirations over the years (Galactica Earrings, The Mirror of Galadriel, Mandalore Earrings, and Ni’Var, for example). With a curving, elongated piece of sparkling pyrite reflecting the swirling arcs of the sterling silver in which it is set, plus gold Keum-boo circles and an orbiting oval of rutilated quartz, Rift captures the movement and marvel of space.
Recently, McKeown’s work has taken a narrative turn. “When I first started making jewelry, I was twenty-four, and I didn’t know if I could make a living at it… I just worked, worked, worked. I did all the right things, I bought a house, I had health insurance.” Then, about ten years ago she realized that she’d “never really taken the time to think about what [her] work was saying.” Now she has embraced the narrative. “I feel this really pressing need. There are things that I want to express through my work… It’s really rewarding.” She adds, “It’s interesting to watch people react to [the narrative] pieces because I think that the energy you put into the work, it imbues that piece with energy, like how our thoughts imbue the world with energy.”
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BYRON MCKEOWN, 1966. Photograph from Better Homes and Gardens, 1970.
One narrative work, a brooch titled The Embrace, resembles a slightly wilted or windblown sunflower and represents McKeown’s rejection of perfection as the standard of beauty. It has a round, warm yellow cabochon of Baltic amber in the center surrounded by silver petals. She explains, “Our society conditions us to believe that anything less than perfection is flawed and a failure, enslaving us to a myth. But true beauty lies in the flaws, the manifestation of mistakes, struggle and decay. It is through these that true creativity is born.” Visible through the amber is a human form in silver curled up in a fetal position conveying both despair at societal pressures and the possibility of new life.
Another narrative work, Hiraeth (a Welsh word for a kind of nostalgic homesickness or yearning for something irretrievably lost), honors McKeown’s father (he died in 2023), whom she describes as a “maker and imaginer of the rarest form.” This piece, with its concentric partial rings of perforated silver, dark cocobolo, and Brazilian agate, suggests the directionless void that comes with grief, “a void that seems to consume the very air.” But she also includes hope in the form of silver and golden granules, some just perceptible through the translucent stone into which they are set, and little gemstone sparkles that represent “the promise that that which is lost, longed for, is in us, among us and of us.”
McKeown notes that, “throughout history art has been a vehicle for rebellion,” and she sees ample opportunity for rebellion now. “I think that no matter what’s going on, art is the one thing that the sons of bitches can’t take away from us. It’s clean, it’s pure.” She struggles with her inclination towards quiet rebellion (and her desire to keep her art unpolluted by the horrors of daily politics) and her concern about the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of that approach. “I’m still looking for exchanges with other people about how they feel. I think we are all looking for what we can do.” She believes, though, that art can make a difference, “If I can make a piece of jewelry that makes somebody feel happy, and I make a connection with them, and we see each other in an authentic way, I think it knits the tribe.” She also has faith in the power of being a maker.
“I really feel like the art of creating—it doesn’t matter if you’re making jewelry, it doesn’t matter if you’re making cookies—is magic. It’s a gift from the universe, the ability to create, to take raw emotion from your heart and bring it out of your hands, it’s magic.” McKeown invites us all to participate in that magic.
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SUGGESTED READING
“Art: It’s a Process,” Discover Tlaquepaque 18, no. 31 (Fall/Winter 2024), 45-55.
“Check Out Lesley Aine McKeown’s Story,” VoyagePhoenix, June 12, 2024, https://voyagephoenix.com/interview/check-out-lesley-aine-mckeowns-story/.
Honaman, Tammy. “Advice on Being a Professional Jewelry Artist from Lesley Aine McKeown,” Interweave, November 18, 2017, https://www.interweave.com/article/jewelry/advice-professional-jewelry-artist-lesley-mckeown/.
“Meet Lesley Aine McKeown: Artist, Jeweler,” Shoutout HTX, December 9, 2020, https://shoutouthtx.com/meet-lesley-aine-mckeown-artist-jeweler/.
Ashley Callahan is an independent scholar and curator in Athens, Georgia, with a specialty in modern and contemporary American decorative arts. She has an undergraduate degree from Sewanee and a master’s degree in the history of American decorative arts from the Smithsonian and Parsons. Her publications include Frankie Welch’s Americana: Fashion, Scarves, and Politics (UGA Press, 2022), Southern Tufts: The Regional Origins and National Craze for Chenille Fashion (UGA Press, 2015), and, as co-author, Crafting History: Textiles, Metals, and Ceramics at the University of Georgia (Georgia Museum of Art, 2018). Callahan met Lesley Aine McKeown at the Atlanta Contemporary Jewelry Show, where she enjoyed observing McKeown’s joy and knowledge of rocks. Her advice to a young collector was, “If you love the stone, buy the stone.”
