About the Artist

Laura Atkins

I am a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in metal, jewelry, sculpture, printmaking, and mixed media. My work is rooted in a lifelong fascination with the natural world—its materials, surfaces, histories, and the evidence it leaves behind.

I began collecting rocks as a child, bringing home pieces that caught my attention simply because there was something remarkable about them. I still have some of those early finds. That instinct to look closely, collect, investigate, and understand has never left me.

Much of my life has been spent outdoors—hiking and backpacking in the mountains, exploring deserts, collecting rocks and fossils, and hunting meteorites. I have searched for meteorites in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts and trekked through Florida swamps in pursuit of the Osceola meteorite fall. The experience of searching the landscape for something rare, ancient, and easily overlooked has profoundly influenced the way I see and make art.

Travel has expanded that vocabulary. Landscapes from Michigan waters and the mountains of Tennessee to the deserts of the American Southwest have found their way into my work. Peru became an especially important influence. Hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu—moving through mountains, stonework, archaeological sites, and the Sun Gate—deepened my interest in the relationship between landscape, human marks, artifacts, and time.

These experiences are not simply subjects for my work. They have shaped how I approach materials and how I think about objects.

About My Work

My work explores the intersection of earth, material, artifact, and human intervention.

I am particularly drawn to metal because it carries evidence of process. Heat, hammering, oxidation, abrasion, soldering, fusing, cutting, and forming all leave traces. Rather than removing every mark of fabrication, I often allow those marks to remain as part of the history of the piece.

My recent jewelry and metalwork combines copper, sterling silver, stones, and found or reclaimed material in forms that can suggest relics, fragments, structures, cages, geological formations, or objects whose histories are not completely known.

There is an intentional tension between the precious and the imperfect: silver against oxidized copper, gemstones against scarred surfaces, controlled construction against irregular form.

My background in intaglio printmaking also continues to influence how I work. I think in terms of surface, line, layering, texture, positive and negative space, and the physical evidence created by a process.

Underlying much of the work is an idea that has followed me from childhood rock collecting through meteorite hunting and into the studio: objects can carry histories far greater than themselves.

Rock Paper Sky is where those histories—and the materials of earth, human hand, and exploration—come together.