Sharon Teaman

Fifty years, one bench

Sharon Teaman grew up in Central Pennsylvania and never really left. She studied fine art at Penn State, stayed for a master's in metal arts, and by 1974 was working as an independent designer — which she has done, without interruption and without ever working for anyone else, for five decades since.

The first ten years she taught full time, running three-dimensional art and jewelry programs while building her own practice in whatever hours were left. That teaching instinct never went away. She still takes on apprentices, and she still explains what she is doing and why to anyone who asks.

Sharon's goal is to elevate jewelry to the status of art, and to create heirlooms treasured for generations to come.

How she works

Sharon buys her own stones. That sounds like a small thing and it is not — most jewelry sold in the United States is assembled from calibrated stones and cast components that the person selling it has never handled loose. She hand-selects museum-quality material throughout the year, often with no design in mind, and lets the stone suggest what it wants to become.

From there the work is a combination of hand-carved wax and jewelry design software. She is unusual among makers of her generation in having adopted CAD genuinely rather than grudgingly — she uses it where it removes guesswork, particularly on custom commissions where a client needs to see a piece before committing, and she carves by hand where the hand is better. The finishing is always hers.

Where the work has gone

Her pieces have appeared on the runway at Couture Fashion Week in New York and in juried art and jewelry exhibitions across the country. She exhibits at eighteen to twenty shows a year, from the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts in State College to Ann Arbor, Philadelphia, Baltimore and the Washington area.

Collectors from around the world own her work, along with a number of celebrities and several well-known athletic coaches. She does not name them, which tells you something about how she operates.

What happens after a piece is finished

Every completed piece is appraised, photographed and archived in a secure digital management system. Those files stay accessible to the client permanently — for insurance claims, for replacement values, or simply to forward to an insurer without having to dig through paperwork. It is an unglamorous part of the job that most independent makers skip, and it is the part clients thank her for years later.

Common questions