Where Body and Craft Meet
Laura Wood’s artistic process is intensely physical and intuitive. She works three-dimensionally, cutting patterns from metal and forming them through constant modification. It might take 40+ samples to achieve the perfect shape, each adjustment teaching her how the metal will curve around a jawline or complement the neck.
“I know if I hit the metal here, it’s gonna move here,” she describes. “Those are things that I’m thinking about while I’m making them.” Her work features layered colors using both industrial paint and glass enamel, creating pieces that shimmer and glow.
“A lot of my designs are made to be sculptural but are engineered to fit the lines of the body,” Laura explains. “There’s a performative aspect to making contemporary jewelry that I love.”
The trick of being a jeweler is that you’ve got to fabricate the piece so that it looks good off the body but functions correctly on the body.
For years, Laura built her reputation traveling to craft shows across the country and abroad, with her work appearing in prestigious venues like the Smithsonian Craft Show and the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery.
But when she and her husband had their daughter in 2022, her model needed to shift.
“I knew I would need to change the structure of my business, because travel is just not easy when you’ve got a little one at home,” Laura explains. She turned to a longtime dream as the solution: opening a brick-and-mortar shop in Asheville’s River Arts District.
Laura credits Mountain BizWorks with providing both financial support and crucial education to make her 2024 shop opening a reality. She took their financial series courses in the first weeks after her daughter was born, knowing she needed to strengthen her business foundation.
Then Hurricane Helene hit, just five months after opening her shop. With all her business now centralized in one location and no shows booked for 2025, uncertainty loomed. “I returned to Mountain BizWorks for some financial support through a very uncertain time,” Laura shares.
The WNC Strong: Helene Business Recovery Fund loan helped her make difficult but necessary decisions. “I’m not sure that without being able to approach Mountain BizWorks for some of the things that I needed for my business at the time, it would have happened as quickly for me.”
Beyond financial support, Mountain BizWorks connected Laura with a cohort of local business owners and introduced her to Craft Your Commerce—a program specifically designed for craft artists.
Now Laura also shares her expertise, teaching workshops through Craft Your Commerce. She shares a powerful story from her “Show Ready Workshop,” in which she addressed pricing strategies. One artist applied strategies from the workshop and sold a large painting in her studio with ease shortly after.
“Craft Your Commerce is just a remarkable resource,” Laura says. “Especially for craft artists who often don’t get a lot of the training that they need while they’re learning their craft.”
The River Arts District took a devastating hit from Hurricane Helene, but its ongoing recovery showcases the community’s strength, too. Laura moved to share space with another artist who lost their location in the flood, while her former space now hosts a displaced artist. “It’s really about everybody wanting each other to recover and thrive again,” she reflects.
Now in the first chapter of this new era with her shop, Laura sees possibilities for growth, including potentially supporting and collaborating with other artists. Mostly, though, she’s excited for creative freedom.
“I’ve always just been so busy traveling from one place to another. Just being able to have a little bit more creative freedom in my space is going to be something that I can’t wait to really fully dive into,” she says.
Her work continues to evolve, always exploring that intersection of form, function, and the human body, a dance of metal and movement that began in a college jewelry class and became her life’s calling.
“The craft community is very supportive of one another. We all want each other to do well.”
