We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Teresa Kiplinger. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Teresa below.

Teresa, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I’ve been a creative soul for as long as I can remember and always dreamed of a life as an artist even when I was very young. As a child, I adored all things creative – sculpting in clay, drawing with charcoal, oil painting, bookmaking, writing poetry– I happily spent all of my childhood making.

The desire to become an artist intensified as I grew older. But at university, I studied graphic design rather than studio art in order to secure practical career options. This led to a successful 25-year career as a graphic designer and owner of a small creative agency in Cleveland. Eventually, though, I found myself longing for a more tangible art form that would allow for pure self-expression. So in midlife, I enrolled in my first metals workshop at a local arts center. I was immediately hooked and gradually grew my skills through a combination of YouTube videos, books, night classes, and many hours at the bench.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a studio jeweler and poet. I combine hand-sculpted precious metals, enameled imagery, and original verse to create haunting and expressive art jewelry. Rooted in a lifelong loam of memory and solitude, I aim to forge luminous heartaches in precious metal.

I learned to work with metals in midlife as a creative way to cope with the end of a painful marriage. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣When my teen stepson died in 2015, I poured my grief into my fledgling metalwork. I forged a bracelet in his memory and was comforted by its presence, weight, and permanence. From within this loss, I found my voice.

My affinity for poetry and its power to express emotions has had perhaps the most significant influence on my metalwork; I etch original micro-poems and stories into jewelry pieces, creating wearable personal narratives in precious metal.

At university, I trained in the aesthetic of the Swiss school of graphic design. Though my body of metalwork does not always reflect the minimal Swiss style of my formal design training, its principles are ever-present in my jewelry work – from an obsessive sensitivity to typography to my attention to negative space.

Themes from my Ohio childhood also appear in my jewelry work. I grew up on my grandparents’ defunct farm. I waded in corn pastures and loved to explore my grandmother’s farmhouse full of 19th-century poetry books, blurry snapshots of strange places, and letters penned by long-dead ancestors. I often try to capture the mystery of those abandoned artifacts and forgotten stories in my jewelry work.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

It has been rewarding to tackle a new and challenging skill in mid-life. The kind of metalwork I create requires patience and persistence. The tools can be intimidating and the processes and techniques are time-consuming to master. The tenacity and grit required to work with metal have helped me grow in all aspects of my life; it has been especially helpful in overcoming anxiety and it’s been fulfilling to strive for ever higher levels of skill and achievement.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I shared my journey as a studio jeweler on my Instagram account from the moment I started learning the craft. In fact, if a person has the patience to scroll to the beginning of my Instagram feed, they will see my skills evolve over nearly a decade!

At first, my social presence had no strategy behind it; I was just posting for fun. When I got serious about building my jewelry brand in 2015, I decided to focus on intentionally growing my Instagram following and developed (and continue to refine) strategies for posting based on platform trends, best practices, post formatting, and frequency. I don’t have time to strategize content for every social channel, so I just focus on Instagram since I really enjoy the platform.

It didn’t happen overnight, but my reach on Instagram steadily grew over the years and has become an important way to connect with prospective customers as well as other artists and makers. I tend to post a mix of content that includes behind-the-scenes videos in my studio, works in progress, live talks, how-to videos, finished work, and creative writing.

I’ve managed to grow my following through totally organic reach, meaning I have never paid for ad placement on any social platform. Today I have about 38K Instagram followers. I’ve never strayed from my creative and personal perspectives on the platform, even when the algorithm didn’t like it; I think authenticity resonates with people, and that resonance draws followers who are supportive, insightful, and kind, which makes engagement on the platform a joy for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.silverpoet.com
• Instagram: @tkiplinger
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeresaKiplingerJewelry
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresa-kiplinger-33979120/