There are 40 or 50 people in Cuchillo, depending on where you draw the line. That’s not a punchline—it’s a fact.
Out here in southern New Mexico, where the hills roll toward the Black Range and the night sky belongs to meteor showers, metalsmith and jeweler Allyson Hayes has found the kind of solitude that doesn’t feel like absence. It feels like ignition.
“When you step outside and look at the hills, you can sometimes see meteor showers in the night sky,” she said. “That’s an astronomer’s dream.”
Cuchillo is not a place you pass through by accident. It’s a place you choose. Hayes chose it 17 years ago, though the story really begins much earlier—on her 17th birthday, boarding a plane from Louisville to New York City.
Born and raised in Louisville, with deep family roots and farms in North Carolina’s Piedmont, she traded southern horizons for Manhattan’s vertical glare.
“New York City was quite the experience,” she said. “I was there like 20 years on the dot.”
She started in modeling—bridal shows, newspaper ads back when department stores still ran glossy fall spreads. That opened the door to the music business, where she worked in studio management and as a studio assistant at a high level. It was fast, creative, intense—and eventually disillusioning.
When that chapter closed, she did what many artists in New York do to survive: she bartended. Everywhere from two-star restaurants to Coyote Ugly. “Super bartender and waitress,” she laughed. It paid the bills. It bought time.
The pivot came on a stretch of streets in Midtown Manhattan known as the Diamond District. A friend led her into a components shop on West 47th Street, a place where pendants, settings, and earring parts glittered in tidy trays. You could assemble a finished piece with little more than pliers and imagination.
“I went in there and I fell in love.”
At first, she worked with ready-made components. Then wire wrapping. But she grew restless. “I quickly got bored with that because I couldn’t get the metal to sit where I wanted.” Metal, it turned out, demanded deeper fluency.
She enrolled in a six-week silversmithing class at the now-closed Craft Students League in New York. Week two, she was signing up at the Fashion Institute of Technology for an applied science degree in jewelry and silversmithing. The turning point was elemental.
“As soon as I lit up a torch and soldered and saw molten metal, I was hooked,” she said. Drawn to “soldering and lighting the torch,” she describes herself as moving toward it “like a moth to the light.”
That image—flame and flight—still defines her work.
Hayes trained in traditional silversmithing techniques, the kind rooted in apprenticeship systems more common in Europe than contemporary America. Folding and forming brass and copper. Precision soldering. Structural integrity. Control. She lights up when she talks about it.
“I’m a technique hog for sure,” she said, grinning. “I love learning techniques because then I can riff on them. I can kind of make up my own techniques from those.”
Technique, for Hayes, is not constraint—it’s vocabulary. Reticulation, for example, requires exact control of flame to create rippling, organic textures in silver. Some days feel like forging. Some days hammering. Some days are devoted entirely to fire. She talks about melting and heat and chemistry with the same enthusiasm she once reserved for music studios.
Her fascination with metal began early. As a child in a two-story house, she spent hours sending a slinky down the staircase. “Even as a child, fascinated with metal,” she said. Today, kinetic elements—movement, flex, fluidity—appear in her metal sculptures. She collects small objects that echo that sensibility. A slinky on her table becomes a metaphor: “another type of fluid metal.”
She’s studied at the Penland School of Craft in the Blue Ridge Mountains, exploring both jewelry and blacksmithing. There she met master metalsmith Elizabeth Brim, known for her steel inflation techniques.
“All of us were like kids,” Hayes said of Brim’s presence in the studio. “She’d walk around and give us tips.”
If New York gave her fire, New Mexico gave her space.
Before Cuchillo, she had a studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, before it was trendy, where she could look out her bench window and see the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge. Yet when she first walked into a metal artist’s home in Cuchillo during a Sierra County studio tour, something shifted.
“I walk in the house. And immediately, I was like, I’m going to live here one day.”
The owner laughed. Six years later, after a brutal week in which her mother fell, her grandmother had a stroke, and she lost a six-figure business, the phone rang. Sitting on a North Carolina porch under a Southern night sky, she picked up.
He was selling the house.
“Sold,” she told him. “It was the most serendipitous timing ever.”
Now, her property includes adobes, open land, and views that feel prehistoric. Surrounded by Bureau of Land Management acreage and private ranches, she can walk straight from her back door into hills that show little evidence of human alteration. No pavement. No light poles. Just raw terrain.
“There’s not one day that goes by where I’m not saying, wow, or ooh, or ah,” she says. “Any place that does that to me is a place I want to be.”
Isolation here is not emptiness. It’s stimulus. She calls herself a steward of her buildings, conscious of the history embedded in adobe walls. A woman once told her that her grandmother had been born in Hayes’s house. That continuity matters.
Her days are shaped by rhythm—nature’s and her own. Long summer light. Snow dusting the Black Range. Meteor showers at night. Some mornings she knows exactly what she’ll make; other days she sits with her materials and waits.
“In this work, there is chemistry, metallurgy, gemology, at times woodcarving, clay construction—I can’t explain to you how bored I am not!”
Jewelry, for Hayes, is not ornament alone. It’s integration. “The thing I love about jewelry is seeing the necklace or seeing the ring on the body and seeing the way that jewelry integrates with the body.” She makes sterling silver bangles, rings, earrings—but also larger outdoor metal pieces. Her grandfather’s saw is still in use. Old plows and an axe from the family farm rest out back, reminders that metal has always been both tool and art.
She’s shown widely, including a decade at the Santa Fe Artists Market in the Railyard, and juried shows across the Southwest. She’s traveled—and plans to explore Mexico’s storied silversmithing villages—but she always circles back.
“I lived in New York for 20. I lived in Kentucky for 17,” she says. “Even when I get to 20 years, this is it. This is home.”
Out here, under desert skies where flame meets metal and meteor showers streak overhead, Hayes has built a life that is anything but small. Cuchillo may have 40 or 50 people. But in her studio, with torch in hand, the universe feels close enough to touch.
For story ideas and suggestions, Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com
