Casper Woman Turns Wyoming Rocks Into Unique Heirloom-Quality Wearable Art

CASPER — A yellow mallet from her grandpa, a wire-winding device made by her dad, and an artistic metal and glass case on her counter full of rocks collected locally help provide continuity and inspiration for jewelry maker and artist Rachel Hawkinson.

Not that she isn’t always thinking about ways to artistically express herself.

Hawkinson’s latest creative venture involves science and art. The creations inside glass specimen cases in the window of her studio on West Yellowstone Highway in Casper bear witness to it.

“I feel like artists are scientists, because we follow that same hypothesis,” she said. “We come up with an idea, and then we have to come up with all these experiments, and we have to figure out how to reproduce those experiments until we keep getting the same result. That’s what scientists do.”

She is nearing completion of her contribution to the “Artists Are Scientists” exhibit that will feature 30 sculptural rings, nearly everyone held together using tension. There is a ring with a flower, a ring that represents a scientific level and another ring that represents the life cycle of a butterfly.

One ring includes both a rock cut and uncut to show what the stone looks like in the “raw.”

“The flora, the fauna, the geology, they’re all kind of intermixed with scientific instruments,” she said, describing her concept.

The Casper-born artist, who serves as president of the Casper Artists’ Collective, plans to debut her exhibit at Red Peak Gallery in Casper in December and then take it in April to Pinedale and possibly to Colorado and Massachusetts later in the year.

Typically, Hawkinson said, artists who work in metals don't produce a series of art that can be exhibited.

“It’s the most complicated project I’ve ever done,” she said.

Her Favorite Subject

Most of the 43-year-old’s life has been centered around art. It was her favorite thing in elementary school and in junior high and high school she took all the electives she could. She graduated from the University of Wyoming with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts.

As a young girl with two sisters and a single-parent father, she gravitated to the welding shop to help her dad on projects.

“I loved power tools, I loved the welder,” she said. “When I got into college and I was taking art classes, I found a metal smithing class, and things just kind of clicked and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

As a metalsmith artist, she stays away from ferrous metal, but works with gold, silver, jeweler’s brass, and lots of wire.

Hawkinson started creating out of college in 2010 and opened T. Hawk Studio in 2015 working out of her garage. Hawkinson moved to her current space at 426 W. Yellowstone Highway in 2021.

She characterizes her style of art as Western art deco because she creates western staples with a modern twist.

T. Hawk Studio art features a lot of parallel lines, circles and curves. She makes belt buckles, bolos, and the most sought-after items in the shop are her rock watches which feature a leather band that she crafts.

“Instead of having a clock on it, it’s a rock of some kind,” she said.

Along the way she also developed a love for geology and rocks.

“I love learning about rocks, and I love learning about where they come from and how they're made, and the different geological processes that it takes to make each and every rock,” she said. “And I kind of got into it actually because of the turquoise. I was working in turquoise quite a bit, and I didn't realize that there were different mines. And each mine for the turquoise actually creates different properties in a turquoise.”

She also enjoys using jasper and Wyoming Sweetwater agates in her creations as well as Wyoming Edward Black Jade which she has gotten from a friend and had him cut for certain pieces.

Rock Hunts

Hawkinson goes on rock hunts with her dad or her lapidary friend in search of material that she can use in her studio. She pulls a bluish rock from the rock display in her studio and shares that she found it in Shirley Basin.

“This is called a blue opal agate and it’s actually one of the biggest ones I’ve found,” she said.

In addition to using rocks, Hawkinson has done special orders for people using elk ivory and she also pulls out a square looking rock-like material that she said is actually dinosaur bone that was cut by her friend as another example of art components.

Her process to make an item involves building the project around the stone or bone. 

Hawkinson pulls out a leather-covered sketchbook that she buys from a Colorado maker and shows sketches of brooches she designed.

After tracing the rocks chosen for the project, she thinks about their fit in a design and the metal required. Tools in the studio allow her to sand and file the metal she uses around the rocks. A drawer in the studio contains several different rolls of wire which she can flatten, solder, and incorporate into her art in many ways.

She also has rolling mills that flatten metal and allow her to layer certain metals.

“I like to throw wire on duct tape and then roll it through the milling, and you get all these cool linear textures,” she said.

A small cylindrical container that she made using wire and her dad’s wire roller and some soldering also shows what is possible.

Whatever art, jewelry, or item she produces, Hawkinson said she wants it to be an heirloom quality.

She used to do special orders but now limits that to just her top tier of customers. She will work with gold but says the price of the metal puts it out of reach for many— she substitutes jeweler’s brass instead.

Yellow Hammer

Hawkinson’s quest for quality has led her to start making her own bolo tips for the ties she sells. Her grandpa’s yellow leather hammer helps her with the leather work she does making the watch bands.

“My mom gave me all this leather tools because I do like leather work, and so every watch band I've ever made, my grandpa's helped me with it,” she said.

Her favorite art of all goes back to conceptual projects. She points to a series of brooches she designed for an exhibit that also are wall art. The brooches can be taken off the wall display and worn and then placed back on the wall.

Hawkinson also made tabletop art pieces using pieces of wood along with a ring, headband and brooch. The jewelry can be taken off and worn and then place back into the tabletop display.

“If I didn’t have to pay the bills, this is what I would do,” she said.

Hawkinson said she is currently working on a patent for her watch bands and other plans to scale her business in a way where she can focus more on the conceptual projects.

But she is not going to step back on the quality.

“I want to make good quality jewelry that people can wear for years and years,” she said. “I want good quality stones.”

And her creations must be interesting. She points to watch bands that have rocks with fossils.

“They’re just cool, something you don’t see every day,” she said. “Basically, my job is to just take what Mother Earth makes and make it wearable and really cool.” 

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.