My work in fine metals and gemstones begins not with a sketch, but with the stone itself. Each piece I make starts from a handpicked specimen, and the design evolves in response to what that particular stone asks for. I think of this as a kind of listening: rather than imposing a predetermined design onto raw material, I let the stone's individual character set the terms of the piece.

That instinct goes back to the first stone I ever set: an ocean jasper cabochon I bought years before I knew how to set a stone at all, simply because I couldn't look away from it. What draws me to stones, again and again, is the microcosm inside each one — the patterns, inclusions, and colors that formed over geologic timescales long before they ever reach my hands. Setting a stone feels less like using a material and more like honoring something that already exists, fully formed, asking to be shown.

My path into this work started small: a job at a bead store during college, where I first learned to see stones as material worth paying attention to. That job planted something in my mind and heart that has grown slowly and steadily into the work I do today. I am largely self-taught. I took my first metals class in 2010, launched my first jewelry line in January 2011, and was a featured artist on Etsy within the year. Since then, my practice has moved through different names and phases — from an early line called "Is Was + Will Be," to the more recent "Telle of the Hills". I've spent recent years bringing metals more explicitly into my practice, and in the fall of 2026 I've relaunched my business under my own name, Telle ter Horst, marking a new chapter that reflects both where my skills have landed and the kind of work I want to make going forward.

Based in Western North Carolina, I'm shaped by what surrounds my studio — the region's geology, its native plants, its small, overlooked ecosystems. That same attentiveness carries into the studio: a instinct to notice, gather, and give form to what's easy to overlook. I think of myself as an ecological artist — someone whose attention to the natural world shapes not just what I make, but how I source what I make it from.