About Carrier Pigeon Jewelry
Born and raised in Michigan, Lauren Neal moved to Minneapolis in 2001 to pursue a degree in Social Work. While working in the field for several years, Lauren had a creative desire that she constantly fed by taking art classes. In 2007, after taking one jewelry class at a local community college, she knew she had found her true calling. Fed up with the paper shuffle of her job and allured by the tangible and mysterious quality of jewelry making, Lauren decided to pursue jewelry full time in 2008. While enrolled in jewelry repair and manufacturing classes, she began designing and making jewelry of her own. Before she graduated in May of 2010, she was selling jewelry in boutiques locally and in New York.
Carrier Pigeon has been with Lauren long before she actually started making jewelry. As a child she began her life long collection of ephemera. Gathering stones, broken glass, coins, fossils and anything that held a strange beauty, Lauren would imagine these things to have had a life of their own with meaning and an inherent message. The first house she remembers living in was next door to an old man with messenger pigeons. Her earliest memories of backyard archeological digs are accompanied by the coo of her pigeon friends.
Since 2010, Carrier Pigeon Jewelry is a one-woman show operated out of Lauren’s studio in Northeast Minneapolis. Using locally sourced, ecologically sound fine metals, each piece is designed and handcrafted solely by her. She continues to draw inspiration from her ephemera and creates pieces that reflect her love of nature, history and story telling.
Jewelry for human kind.
