Sandra McEwen, Fine Art Jeweler

Sandra McEwen, Fine Art Jeweler, is a glass artist creating Champleve and Cloisonné enamel jewelry on fine silver in her ArtSpace studio in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.

Sandra received the 2013 Dino Read Foundation Award and the 2013 Jan Gregg Award at the 44th Annual Fine Designer Crafts Show in Raleigh.

Sandra McEwen

I am a glass artist creating Champleve and Cloisonné enamel jewelry on fine silver. After graduating in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, I apprenticed in glass in Italy. For many years I worked primarily in leaded glass, an experience that informs my work as a jeweler.

For each piece, there are essentially three elements I consider – lines, shapes, and colors.

I love thinking about the way lines can guide your eye to and through a piece and back again on a prescribed path of my choosing, the lines and colors combining to create off-kilter shapes that, when viewed together, seem perfectly balanced.

I revel in the actual fabrication of an object — the blade cutting silver; the fused metal glowing mellow red, then shimmering and flowing like water; the layers of enamel changing from grains of sand, to orange peel, to molten hot; the opposite and true colors fading in so slowly.

When I am creating a work of jewelry, the experience is an intimate one – I am establishing a dialog with the one person who will ultimately wear it.