OBRA: The Art of Work Words and portraits of working women

Mindy Hamilton

BONDED Jewelry | Hamilton Hats

I grew up in Ohio, and I grew up on a horse farm and a dairy farm and my whole life was around mud and muck and working hard. We never went without, but when you’re a farmer, you don’t really have a lot of money — we had two, three, four pairs of jeans and a couple pairs of shoes to get us through the school year. Of course, you always had what you needed to be on the farm, that was always priority: the boots, the Carhartts. My whole life, I grew up riding horses. My mom still rides horses, she rides barrel horses. I rode barrel horses, my brothers rode barrels, some of my nieces ride. I started there, didn’t have a lot of pretty things… I think our horses had nicer things than we did! The saddles, I know they were probably more expensive than our cars.

When I had my first big girl job, I worked at a jewelry store and this would have been 18 or 19 years old and then from there I worked in finance. I say this because jewelry fascinated me. I really loved jewelry, and as you can tell I still really love jewelry. I think that’s because I didn’t have those shiny things, so maybe not only do I love what they look like and feel like but how confident they make you feel. When you come from somewhere very unaffluent, you kind of always look at those things like, maybe that makes people better than you. You don’t know until you’re older that it doesn’t mean any of that, right? I worked at the jewelry store and that basically turned into me handing them my paycheck. I had to get a bigger-girl job to pay for the house and the car and all this, so I worked in finance.‍ ‍READ MORE HERE