Elle Irwin is a contemporary jewelry artist based in Key West, Florida. Her practice is shaped by the islands and shorelines she inhabits and explores, from the American Southeast where she grew up to the coastal landscapes she continues to seek out in her travels. With a background in sculpture, painting, and illustration, she approaches jewelry as an extension of sculptural thinking, scaled to the body and attentive to form, movement, and memory.

Her process often begins with a found object—natural or man-made—that is hand-sculpted into an original and then reimagined through drawing, 3D scanning, or digital modeling. Through these layered translations, her work moves from the familiar toward abstraction, creating pieces that echo relics while suggesting futuristic forms.
Irwin’s work has been presented internationally, including exhibitions at Milan Jewelry Week and Munich Jewelry Week.

Elle Irwin’s work explores the tension between what is fleeting and what endures, examining how objects retain memory and meaning across shifting timelines. Fragments shaped by sea and island life reveal the persistence of natural forms alongside the mark of human intervention. Discarded fishing nets, engineered to harness nature yet altered by water, become catalysts for new sculptural language.

Submerged, they shift and flow, embodying a fragile balance between utility and erosion, ephemerality and permanence.
These altered structures emerge as artifacts that feel simultaneously unearthed and futuristic. Irwin’s pieces question how what is cast off might endure, how relics can orient us forward as much as back, and how material reflects the evolving relationship between humans and the environments they inhabit.
For Irwin, jewelry is an intimate form of sculpture — vessels of memory that carry stories of the sea, time, and imagined worlds.