Altar Metals, Nicasio, CA
My name is Lilla Cory Warren and I currently make all Altar Metals pieces by hand in Nicasio, California, with a little help from JR Casting, a company in San Francisco who cast a few of my designs and some of my jewelry elements. I grew up on Martha's Vineyard, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, and I have always loved jewelry. Making beaded or woven cord jewelry was a hobby when I was little, and one of my favorite things to do was go through my mother's and grandmother's jewelry boxes and hear the stories that went along with the pieces.
I have been a student of metalsmithing since 2007 when I took my first jewelry making class at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, and I have attended ten different intensive courses at craft schools in the southeast to supplement my college Art School education.
I connected early with the opportunity for life enrichment, meaning, and healing that jewelry brings. Whether its a connection to a person or place, a promise, protection, or physical healing, placing jewelry on the body is and always has been throughout time, a way to communicate to ourselves and others our intentions and a hint at our inner world.
My favorite way to use jewelry has been for healing and growth, placing jewelry on my body that invites energies I would like to cultivate in myself. In this way, the body becomes like an altar, a place upon which meaningful symbols and materials are displayed to communicate our desires and devotions.
Because I also learned metalsmithing skills in school, in the context of sculptural metalwork, I have the ability to create vessels, utensils, and simple tools in the traditional ways that were developed to make fine silver accoutrements and serving dishes as well as cooking pots and other useful household things long ago. The tools we have available today have changed but the principle remains the same, to work with the plasticity of metal using hammers and forming stakes to give form to flat sheets of metal.
After I came to California in 2012 and became steeped in a spiritual atmosphere that draws inspiration from all around the world, and I learned many different ways to work with altars, it became a love and a habit to work with altars in my personal life, and to create tools and ceremonial vessels that can be used in altar or ritual work, using the traditional metalsmithing techniques that I have learned over the years.
I am proud to be one of infinite numbers of craftspeople throughout time and space, using their skills to aid in spiritual practices and healing for ourselves and our planet and all beings, and I hope to offer my skills to people who will bring lots of healing to themselves and the world.
