Hi.
Welcome to the Ozone and our adventures!
Welcome to the Ozone and our adventures!
We love the adventure and allure of finding and mining earth’s treasures, bringing them to studio, and creating wearable art pieces for you to wear. ‘The Ozone’ has been a studio where Cutting, Polishing, Faceting, Cabochon Making, Silversmithing, Casting, and other stone and metal related artforms have been taking place for over a decade and a half. Karen processes the materials and creates the pieces and her husband does the driving, occasional digging, dog wrangling, and large saw operations.
The Ozone came into being as an Art Gallery located on the bayfront in a Central Oregon Coast beachtown in 2010. Though it was a platform for all art media, Karen (owner/operator) brought in jewelry and later made the gallery a studio space for metalsmithing and light lapidary. After wonderful memories there, the gallery was closed roughly a decade later, but the lapidary and jewelry commenced (of course). Though the location has changed we opted to keep the name and the sentiment of the Ozone vision.
Art and jewelry making have been part of Karen’s life since taking first steps. Both Karen’s mother and grandfather worked in silversmithing, jewelry making, and lapidary. At 7 years of age, Karen was passed the torch (literally) by her grandfather and shown how to create a turquoise and silver ring. Karen’s mother was a full time professional artist and taught her all the different media and styles that interested her. Jewelry was a staple income in Karen’s young adult life, while more sophisticated techniques and applications would be learned and applied in the decades after. Presently Karen is a full time professional artist featuring the gems and jewelry here, but also pursuing all the other art loves (painting, printing, design, etc.).
We are presently creating seasonal ‘drops’ of jewelry creations here, and offering raw materials during live streams on YouTube. The future holds more mining opportunities for us to reveal and present beautiful rock and gem materials from Oregon and beyond. We LOVE to go get the minerals ourselves and watch (well, ‘do’) the entire transformation of seeing a rock come out of the ground and become a beautiful piece of jewelry. We also delight in bringing new techniques to the table, like the enameling and cloisonne’ that we’ve been recently investigating. The future is full of new designs, fresh gems, and learning new silversmithing techniques to add to the unique and innovative designs that are conjured by our adventures. This we’ll add to all the lessons learned that were passed down through family generations. We’re thankful for the legacy and to bring these treasures to you.
