Never underestimate the impact of a high-school art class — it might just blossom into a 33-year career.
In 1978, at age 12, Maria Cristalli moved with her family from California to Mercer Island. Once enrolled at Mercer Island High School, she took a pivotal jewelry-making class with art teacher Laurie Hall (now a jeweler in Portland). Right away, Cristalli was intrigued by the properties and possibilities of metal — how you could bend and texturize it, render it shiny or matte, all with a little heat and pressure. She’d encountered a kind of alchemy.
Fast forward a decade or so, including a detour spent studying photography at the University of Washington, and Cristalli’s early interest in metalsmithing resurfaced. This time it was blacksmithing that caught her attention, when she saw the age-old art form in action at the Okanogan Family Barter Faire in Tonasket, Washington, in the early 1990s. The spark was rekindled, at a much larger scale…