From an early age, Lynda Watson was drawn to metal’s magnetism. She wore, collected, and made jewelry, constructing one piece out of vacuum-cleaner parts in a friend’s garage. Not until college, however, did she recognize metalsmithing as a career.

After receiving her AA in commercial art from Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, and then working in an unsatisfying job, she enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where she took a jewelry seminar and “was smitten,” she says. “I loved the scale, intimacy, precision, and process—and working with precious materials.” She did undergraduate work in drawing and illustration before receiving a BA in general crafts and jewelry, followed by an MA and MFA in jewelry/metals.

Her work, Watson told the Metal Museum, “regardless of media, is mostly about places and what I find in them. Travel, adventures, encounters, celebrations, family gatherings, friendships, and relationships are all associated with places and provide and inform the visual information that drives my work.”

To create jewelry that reflects her life experience, she continually innovates. An early series, for example, using a wax-into-clay technique, was inspired by row houses in Pittsburgh. She’s drawn in color on metal surfaces in another series. A set of brooches and necklaces represented travels to Cape Cod, Mexico, Ireland, Prague, Southeast Asia, and other places, using found shells and rocks combined with metal and small drawings under watch crystals.