About Erin Colvin

Artist, metalsmith, designer, and founder of High Society Collection.

I grew up five miles up the South Bank of the Chetco River in Brookings, a small town on the southern Oregon coast where my family has lived for generations.

I was making things before I really understood what it meant to be an artist. As a small child, I was constantly looking for a paintbrush. When I couldn't find one, I made my own from a stick, masking tape, and hair from our very strange and wonderful orange dog, Weezy.

My little sister with Weezy, Brookings, Oregon.

Both of my grandmothers painted, and making things was simply part of the world I knew.

FINDING METAL

I arrived at the University of Oregon planning to become a pharmacist and eventually return home to Brookings. During my first year, I signed up for a Jewelry and Metalsmithing class for fun.

I expected to learn something like wire wrapping. Instead, someone put a torch in my hand.

I fell in love.

Metalsmithing gave me more than a way to make things. It introduced me to questions that still drive my work: Why do we make objects? What gives them value? What do materials communicate? How do the things we make reflect the culture around us?

I earned my BFA in Metalsmithing and Jewelry from the University of Oregon in 2007 and received a Windgate Fellowship from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design. The fellowship allowed me to travel to jewelry manufacturing centers in Birmingham, England, and China to study the production of everyday jewelry—the objects we use to communicate love, commitment, and devotion.

After returning from my travels, I used the remainder of my fellowship to establish a studio in Portland with my best friend from college. Together we created The Opulent Project, a conceptual jewelry practice that sold through galleries and museum stores. We worked together for several years before eventually deciding to follow separate creative paths.

Wearing an Opulent Project earring, Portland.

THE OBJECT THAT STARTED HIGH SOCIETY

Growing up, my mother kept an old metal roach clip tucked into a houseplant. Her sister had brought it home from hitchhiking adventures in the 1970s, but by the time I encountered it, it was simply a strange little mechanical object living among the leaves.

I had no idea what it was. I played with it like a tiny character—a kind of tweezer man.

Years later, after my parents divorced and my mother had moved out, I spotted it still sitting in a plant at home. I took it with me—and then somehow lost it that same day.

But the object stayed with me.

I eventually made my own version, first as a gift while I was in college and later as something I began researching more seriously. That search led me to Squirkenwerks, a San Francisco company that made sliding mechanical roach clips in the 1970s, and to its founder, artist and furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett.

Early clip experiments, 2013–2014.

I was fascinated by Garry's story: an artist who moved between making objects and building businesses, adapting his work as the culture around him changed. In 2014, while traveling to San Francisco for a craft fair, I reached out to him.

He invited me to visit.

I spent a day with Garry in the converted Oakland warehouse where he lived and worked, with his workshop downstairs and his home above. He looked at the clips I was making, gave me feedback, and connected my emerging practice to an earlier generation of artists and makers exploring some of the same territory.

With Garry Knox Bennett, San Francisco, 2014.

That strange little object from my childhood eventually became one of the seeds of High Society Collection.

The Work Today

Over the years, High Society Collection has grown beyond its beginnings in jewelry and clever little clips. My practice moves between metalsmithing, ceramics, sculpture, and objects that don't always fit neatly into a category.

I am interested in ritual, humor, hidden function, and transformation. I love the relationship between precious and ordinary materials, and the ways objects can hold meaning beyond their intended purpose.

But my relationship with making has changed.

I became a mother and lost my sister within the same year. Those experiences shifted my understanding of time, love, grief, and what matters. More recently, I lost my mother after her experience with cancer.

For much of my adult life, I was always working toward something—the next collection, the next opportunity, the future version of my career. Motherhood and grief have asked me to slow down and be more present.

I still love being an artist, but I no longer believe that making more, or making faster, necessarily means making better work.

The Altar Collection has developed slowly through this period of my life. Some pieces have taken years to complete. Others began as experiments that I put aside and eventually returned to. Throughout the collection, I find myself exploring cycles, transformation, adornment, and our relationship with the unseen.

I am learning to let the work move at the pace of my life, rather than the other way around.

Made by Hand, Made with Meaning

I believe the value of a handmade object extends beyond its materials or the hours spent making it.

An object carries something of the person who made it—their curiosity, their experiences, their decisions, and sometimes even their grief.

When you bring a piece of High Society Collection into your life, you are receiving something made by a real person, working through a real life.

That connection is what makes handmade objects meaningful to me.

Thank you for being here.

Erin Colvin

Artist and founder, High Society Collection
Portland, Oregon