Kriya Davis’s raw materials come from two places: her garden in Portland and the Maine coast. That’s not a metaphor. She presses real sage leaves into sterling silver. She builds wave forms from coastal finds. The jewelry has an organic quality not because she’s going for an aesthetic, but because she’s actually working from the physical world around her.
She is a metalsmith, working in her home studio in Portland. Traditional techniques — hand-worked metal, formed piece by piece — in sterling silver and small-batch bronze. She has been making jewelry for over two decades, quietly, as a one-woman operation.
“When I step into my studio, it is the potential for the unexpected that inspires me,” she wrote on her website. “Using traditional metalsmithing techniques, each piece of my jewelry is crafted to possess a unique quality only found from hand worked metal.”
That’s accurate, and it explains something about why the work holds up over time. Two pieces made from the same design won’t be identical. The silver moves differently when you work it by hand. The impression of a leaf, the shape of a wave form — there’s variation, and the variation is the point.
You can see the range in the piece names: Sage Leaf Necklace. Tide. Wave. Ginkgo. Vision. They don’t read like product SKUs — they read like notes from a walk. That’s not an accident. Kriya works in Portland but spends time on the coast, and the coast shows up in the work consistently. Not as a theme she’s chosen to brand around, but as material she actually uses.
She sells at Portland’s maker markets in summer and fall — Taproot Market and others around the city — and through her Etsy shop. The Artist Collective in Edgecomb is a new chapter: her work in a permanent physical gallery, on the midcoast, where the tides and shoreline that show up in her jewelry are right outside the door.
She describes connecting with customers through “a shared love of jewelry and design” as essential to what she does. The work is quiet but specific. You have to get close to see what’s in it.