Announcing the 2026 Project Grant Recipients: Lori Talcott & Kristin Tollefson
This year the Guild’s board voted to fund two projects. Meet the recipients and the work the grant will support.
At the Northwest Jewelry & Metals Symposium on October 10, the Seattle Metals Guild announced the recipients of its 2026 Project Grant. For the first time, the board voted to fund two projects, and we’re delighted to introduce Lori Talcott and Kristin Tollefson.
About the Project Grant
The Project Grant supports a Guild member in pursuing a self-directed project. Funds can go toward new work, research, travel, documentation, studio equipment, an exhibition, or whatever the project genuinely needs. In return, each recipient shares what they’ve discovered or created with fellow Guild members once the project is complete.
Applications are scored by three professionals from the field, on the project as proposed: the clarity of the idea, the plan behind it, whether it’s feasible, and how it will be shared with the Guild. This year’s jurors were Biba Schutz, Anya Kivarkis, and Sarah Darro.
Lori Talcott
Lori Talcott was born into a family of jewelers and watchmakers and apprenticed with a master silversmith in Norway, specializing in traditional folk jewelry.
Her practice returns again and again to systems of knowledge rooted in mythology, folklore, and folk magic. She approaches these ancient narratives and pre-modern belief systems not as history, but as a working, alternative way of understanding the world. At the center of her work is the idea that objects, including jewelry and adornment, act as agents, mediating between the personal, the social, and the metaphysical.
Her most recent exhibition, Jewels for the Underworld, drew on stories of descent and began from a single question: what does one need in the Underworld? The response to that exhibition at Sienna Patti during New York Jewelry Week affirmed that the work is urgent and timely.
With the grant, Lori plans a dedicated, uninterrupted stretch away from teaching and commission work to go deeper into these concepts, to research, and to prototype the forms that carry them. This time will lay the foundation for a new body of work toward a future exhibition.
Lori will return to the Guild with an artist presentation featuring process photographs, finished work, and a discussion of what a research-driven practice looks like from the inside.
Learn more about Lori and her work at loritalcott.com
Kristin Tollefson
Kristin Tollefson is an artist and educator whose work investigates the physical, social, and psychological relationships between people and their environment. Her practice spans jewelry and drawings, studio sculpture, playable works for parks and schools, and freestanding pieces for civic agencies. Much of it is hand-worked and labor-intensive, made through weaving, cold forging, and stitching, and sensory engagement is central to how the work is meant to be experienced.
For ten years, Kristin has also facilitated Creative Aging programs for people living with cognitive impairment and their care partners. That work, and her commitment to the senses, shaped the question she is now bringing into the studio.
Her new body of work, Tender, is a collection of wearable artworks and interventions that celebrate the physical, sensual, aging body. Behind it is a question: can art that is activated through the senses, including touching and wearing, help engage and celebrate bodies full of lived experience? She describes these pieces as an alternative to the harm done by the absence of physical touch, and by the invisibility our culture imposes on us as we age.
The grant will fund a self-initiated residency, giving Kristin dedicated studio time to expand this work. Alongside it, she will work with the Frye Art Museum’s Creative Aging program, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Franke Tobey Jones senior living community, bringing peers in to handle and test the pieces as they develop.
Kristin’s sharing plan includes an in-person talk with a pop-up installation where the work can be demonstrated and handled, plus a second online presentation built with accessibility in mind: captioned, recorded, and transcribed, with descriptive interpretation of the visual work and potential ASL support.
Learn more about Kristin and her work at kltollefson.com
Thank you
Both of these projects will now have the time and attention they need to come to fruition, with help from the Guild. It’s a wonderful use of our shared resources.
Our thanks to jurors Biba Schutz, Anya Kivarkis, and Sarah Darro for their careful review, and to every member who applied. Watch for Lori’s and Kristin’s presentations in the coming year.
