It starts with the land.

The desert after rain. Creosote and wet earth. The arroyo running. Coyotes at dusk, calling across the wash. The monsoon storms that roll in over the Mogollon Rim and crack the sky open. The moon huge and low on the horizon. That feeling of an old truck on an open road with a cassette tape playing and the windows rolled down. A freedom you can't name but you know in your bones.

This isn't a place I'm inspired by. It's the place I'm made of.

I'm a multi-generation Arizonan. I grew up in trading posts. My grandmother, Margaret Kilgore, opened hers in 1960 in Tuba City, Arizona, deep in Navajo and Hopi country. My aunt, Kelly Kilgore, carries it forward to this day from Mancos, Colorado. The smell of sagebrush and old silver. The Native women who walked through in velvet blouses, wearing turquoise as part of their body, not an accessory. Something you put on and never took off.

I absorbed it the way you absorb the sound of coyotes at night. It becomes the air you breathe.

My mother has worn the same turquoise ring my entire life. Her mother commissioned it from a Navajo silversmith. She wore it across North Africa, down into Mexico. The stone broke. A silver snake was laid across the top to hold it in place. She kept wearing it. The Navajo say turquoise reflects the health of the wearer over time. I've watched it change on her hand for decades.

She still wears it.

My maternal grandmother wore large, bold Navajo pieces. Stamped silver and turquoise, heavy, unapologetic. A Santo Domingo shell with spiny oyster I remember her wearing my entire childhood. Nothing trendy about it. It was personal. It spoke of who she was and how she moved through the world.I was three months old when my mother pierced my ears. Baby Rosa in a tiny bracelet, earrings, a headscarf. 

I didn't choose jewelry. I was born into it.

Both my parents are lifelong artists. My mother, a sculptor and painter. My father painted the Southwest for more than fifty years. My paternal grandmother was born in Taos. My uncle by marriage, Jesse Monongya, was a Navajo Hopi jeweler. I'd sit in his studio and watch him cut the stones he was known for. In high school my jewelry teacher was a Navajo jeweler. I learned tufa casting from him. Later I worked with the medicine man's daughter to sharpen what he'd taught me.

Making things was just what people did.

Then I left. England as a child. Southern California, Chicago, Santa Fe as an adult. I started making jewelry in California. Tentatively, like someone testing whether a language they'd heard as children still lived in their fingers. It did. But it wasn't until I moved back to Arizona that I got serious.

You have to leave to know what you're from.

I married an artist. John Mettier. Everyone calls him Dude. He grew up surfing the Central Coast, a skater and a western man who taught himself lapidary and started making skull rings because something in him needed to work with his hands. We built an 800-square-foot studio together. Now we make everything side by side. Slowly. In small batches. Sometimes just one piece.

I work in sterling silver and ancient bronze. Materials that age with you. I choose pearls that aren't perfectly round. I prefer the imperfect to the perfect. Each piece is made here, in Payson, Arizona. Not because handmade is a selling point. Because I don't know any other way to make something that matters.

The women who wear Rosa Kilgore tend to be a certain kind. Independent. Grounded. They don't need to explain their choices. They want pieces that feel like they've always belonged to them. Pieces that connect them to something untamed, no matter where they are or what they're doing.

That feeling when you open the box and think, there it is.

xo
Rosa