Made from
saltwater, land,
and loss.
alchemaris — the story
I'm Shannon. A New York and New Jersey native with salt water in my veins and desert dust still caught somewhere in my hair. I grew up on the edge of things; the edge of the ocean, the edge of the forest, the edge of where the known world hands itself over to something wilder.
My father was the first cartographer of my inner world. He spent his summers in Montauk as a boy, camping on the beach, fishing at the edge of the Atlantic, and he gave that inheritance freely. We explored lakes and forests and coastlines the length of the eastern seaboard. Eventually we graduated to boats, spending whole summers on the water in Montauk, learning the rhythms of the sea not as tourists, but as people who belonged to it. He also carried a deep reverence for Native American history and culture, the teachings and music of several tribes. He taught me, early, that the land (and sea) is always speaking. You only have to learn how to listen.
A pearl is a gem made by a living organism, born from irritation, shaped by time. I find that endlessly true.
I — the first collection
I made my first piece of jewelry in 2008 as a public speaking final. I was tasked to teach something; I chose beading. A hobby became a quiet obsession, and for years it simmered. I've always moved between worlds: a fashion merchandising major who studied form and feeling, a retail wholesale manager and consultant by trade, a painter and graphic designer in stolen hours. Creative, always. Rooted, but usually always in motion.
In 2016, I found myself standing in the Arizona desert. The land stopped me cold. There's a particular kind of silence in the Southwest; ancient and alive at once. I wandered Navajo trading posts and felt something click. A gentleman on the reservation sold me fifty hand-knapped arrowheads. Just like that, I had my first real collection. The brand I'd called Bijou became Arrow & Alchemy, and I taught myself to dip in copper because the connection between arrowheads and copper felt less like a choice and more like an inevitability, written somewhere in the long cultural memory of the earth.
II — the sea changes everything
Hawaii arrived in 2018 like a confirmation of something I hadn't yet been able to name. If Arizona whispered, Hawaii roared. The ʻāina; the land, the sea, that charged and sacred air, spoke in a frequency I felt in my chest. I knew, standing there, that the ocean had to live in my work.
Life intervened, as it does. And then, in 2023, my father died… suddenly, too soon; and something in me cracked open and poured out. Grief has a way of clarifying what matters. I returned to the jewelry with new urgency and new tenderness. Pearls entered my practice in abundance: imperfect strands, lustrous and singular, each one a reminder that beauty is often the result of an organism choosing to transform what hurts it. I collected them obsessively… the odd ones, the luminous ones, the ones that caught light in unexpected ways.
Shells followed, gathered from Hawaii and Montauk and the Gulf Coast shores of southwest Florida, where my grandparents lived and where the water runs a different shade of green.
III — where it all coheres
The arrowheads never left me, but I needed them to speak the same language as the sea. The answer came in opal glass, a glowing, iridescent material that holds the color of Hawaiian shallows and Florida shores, while still carrying the heat and mystery of the Arizona desert, the culture of Montauk's original inhabitants. Ancient and coastal at once. Everything, finally, in conversation.
Arrow & Alchemy was what happened when a life lived in motion became something you could hold in your hand. Each piece a talisman… of water and land, of inheritance and grief and wonder, of listening to the places and people that shaped me, and letting them speak through what I make.
IV — alchemaris, the alchemy of the sea
Somewhere along the way, the name I'd carried for nearly a decade began to feel like a chapter rather than the whole story. Arrow & Alchemy had been born in the desert, from copper and stone and the ancient pull of the earth. But the work had evolved, just as I had. The ocean was no longer simply an influence. It had become the current running through everything.
I wanted a name that could hold all of it. The desert and the shoreline. The places I'd wandered and the things I'd gathered. The people I'd loved and lost. Something that felt both ancient and entirely my own.
Alchemaris. A name born from the marriage of alchemy and maris, Latin for "of the sea." The alchemy of the sea.
Alchemy has always been about transformation; the belief that something ordinary can become extraordinary through time, intention, and a little mystery. And the sea is perhaps the greatest alchemist of all. It takes what is broken and makes it smooth. It turns grains of sand into glass, irritation into pearls, and the remnants of once-living things into treasures washed ashore. Nothing is ever truly lost. It simply changes form.
There is something deeply personal in that understanding. The ocean has been a constant in my life, even as everything around it has shifted. It is where my father first taught me to pay attention. Where I've gone to feel small in the best possible way. Where I've found both solace and possibility, and where so much of what I create begins.
The arrow is still here. So is the desert. So is every version of myself that brought me to this place. But Alchemaris gives them all a wider horizon.
This is not a departure from Arrow & Alchemy. It is its becoming.
Alchemaris is an archive of a life spent collecting more than objects. It's a collection of places, memories, and moments made tangible. Every shell carries a coastline. Every stone holds a history. Every pearl is proof that something beautiful can emerge from what was once difficult to bear.
This is not just jewelry. It's a direction. It's an inheritance. It's the ongoing alchemy of a life that keeps surprising me.
And like the sea, it is always becoming.