The Artist

Susan Lister Locke is an artist and jewelry designer living on the Island of Nantucket thirty miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Susan was born in Boston and grew up along the Rhode Island coast. Her love of drawing and fashion design, at a young age, generated a lifelong passion for art and its presence in all facets of her life.

Following a career in running high end retail that allowed her to express her artistic eye through apparel and accessories as well as styling A list celebrities and politicians, Susan found her way back to the magical island of Nantucket in 1991 while raising two daughters as a single Mom. After spending 25 years in the specialty store clothing business, jewelry design became her second career: she was ready to reimagine her life and focus on her artistic passion.

Always drawn to the beauty of the sea and nature, she was inspired to begin taking classes in portraiture and jewelry design. From her Gallery on Easy Street, looks out on Nantucket Harbor, with all its marine activity, and sees the fabulous light and changing colors of the Sun, Sea and Sky. Susan says, “I find this, along with the flora and fauna of the Island, truly inspirational and vital to my work and to my very being.”

Learning the discipline of metalsmithing at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle Maine and Rhode Island School of Design as well as through workshops and classes in the USA and Italy, she has never looked back. Susan successfully built a clientele selling her work privately, as well as through The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Dimson Homma, in New York City and the prestigious Nantucket Looms.

With 18 karat gold, and other metals, she has incorporated patterns and designs found in nature and paired them with vibrant gemstones. The influences of Art Deco and Van Gogh, Klimt and Cartier ebb and flow as she creates jewelry that is beautiful, unique, and timeless. “I try to incorporate all of this into my work, into my choices for gemstones, my shapes and finishes, whether they be sculptural or organic, highly polished or subtly burnished,” Susan says. “I may start with an idea- a specific image, but oftentimes the process itself takes me on a different journey, and surprises me… It is as if what emerges as a finished design was there all the time, with its own energy, just waiting to be released."

Voted Best Jeweler on Nantucket in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, she exhibits her artistry at The Susan Lister Locke Gallery on Nantucket, Palm Beach Florida and other select venues across the country.