Made from
saltwater, land,
and loss.
arrow & alchemy — the story
I'm Shannon. A New York and New Jersey native with salt water in my veins and desert dust still caught somewhere in my hair. I grew up on the edge of things; the edge of the ocean, the edge of the forest, the edge of where the known world hands itself over to something wilder.
My father was the first cartographer of my inner world. He spent his summers in Montauk as a boy, camping on the beach, fishing at the edge of the Atlantic and he gave that inheritance freely. We explored lakes and forests and coastlines the length of the eastern seaboard. Eventually we graduated to boats, spending whole summers on the water in Montauk, learning the rhythms of the sea not as tourists, but as people who belonged to it. He also carried a deep reverence for Native American history and culture, the teachings and music of several tribes. He taught me, early, that the land is always speaking. You only have to learn how to listen.
A pearl is a gem made by a living organism, born from irritation, shaped by time. I find that endlessly true.
I — the first collection
I made my first piece of jewelry in 2008 as a public speaking final. I was tasked to teach something, I chose beading. A hobby became a quiet obsession, and for years it simmered. I've always moved between worlds: a fashion merchandising major who studied form and feeling, a retail wholesale manager and consultant by trade, a painter and graphic designer in stolen hours. Creative, always. Rooted, usually in motion.
In 2016, I found myself standing in the Arizona desert. The land stopped me cold. There's a particular kind of silence in the Southwest; ancient and alive at once. I wandered Navajo trading posts and felt something click into place. A gentleman on the reservation sold me fifty hand-knapped arrowheads. Just like that, I had my first real collection. The brand I'd called Bijou became Arrow & Alchemy, and I taught myself to dip in copper because the connection between arrowheads and copper felt less like a choice and more like an inevitability, written somewhere in the long cultural memory of the earth.
II — the sea changes everything
Hawaii arrived in 2018 like a confirmation of something I hadn't yet been able to name. If Arizona whispered, Hawaii roared. The aina ; the land, the sea, that charged and sacred air, spoke in a frequency I felt in my chest. I knew, standing there, that the ocean had to live in my work.
Life intervened, as it does. And then, in 2023, my father died — suddenly, too soon — and something in me cracked open and poured out. Grief has a way of clarifying what matters. I returned to the jewelry with new urgency and new tenderness. Pearls entered my practice in abundance: imperfect strands, lustrous and singular, each one a reminder that beauty is often the result of an organism choosing to transform what hurts it. I collected them obsessively…the odd ones, the luminous ones, the ones that caught light in unexpected ways.
Shells followed, gathered from Hawaii and Montauk and the Gulf Coast shores of southwest Florida, where my grandparents lived and where the water runs a different shade of green.
III — where it all coheres
The arrowheads never left me, but I needed them to speak the same language as the sea. The answer came in opal glass, a glowing, iridescent material that holds the color of Hawaiian shallows and Florida shores, while still carrying the heat and mystery of the Arizona desert. Ancient and coastal at once. Everything, finally, in conversation.
Arrow & Alchemy is what happens when a life lived in motion becomes something you can hold in your hand. Each piece is a talisman….of water and land, of inheritance and grief and wonder, of listening to the places and people that shaped you, and letting them speak through what you make.
This is not just jewelry. It's a direction. It's an archive. It's the ongoing alchemy of a life that keeps surprising me.
— Shannon / arrow & alchemy