Charlotte Allsbrook

Charlotte Allsbrook began learning the craft of metalsmithing as a high school student in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Waynesville, North Carolina. In addition to jewelry making, she paints and draws—practices that inform and feed one another in a lateral, intuitive way. All of her three-dimensional metal pieces begin as two-dimensional drawings, and most of her paintings are observed from life and translated onto a flat plane. 

Alongside her academic training at UNC Chapel Hill, she worked as a bench jeweler at a local shop, and later lived in Florence, Italy, where she received further instruction in traditional oil painting, printmaking, and jewelry making. 

She considers herself both craftswoman and artist, finding joy in the processes of creating and problem-solving, regardless of medium. In the age of the internet and digital media, she finds particular value in tactile crafts like oil painting and metalsmithing. If doomscrolling is a passive and numbing consumption, artmaking is its opposite: an act of intention, labor, and creation. 

For Charlotte, art making is a way of listening closely, partaking wholeheartedly, and cultivating sensitivity. She hopes to spend her life working in this way.