Conversations with Jennifer Sheldt

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jennifer Sheldt.

Hi Jennifer, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I come from a long line of makers. My grandfather built heirloom furniture that still lives on through my family today, and the women in my family wove the world together one thread at a time. My mom filled our home with warmth — a pile of scarves and afghans stacked like hugs, stitched right into the fabric of my childhood.

As a girl, I never imagined art would become my life’s work. I loved making things, but I didn’t yet understand creation as a way of life. Over time, I learned that making is my way of belonging — to myself, to my people, and to the pulse of this Earth. The clayworks I share with my community of women, friends, and family are my way of holding their hands, the clay itself molding mine to theirs, as we walk each other home.

I first discovered my passion for pottery while working in an AmeriCorps position with a local nonprofit in Athens, Georgia, I found myself scraping by—no car, strict hours, and the smallest wages of my life. But community surrounded me. I carpooled to a community pottery studio called Good Dirt, where I worked in exchange for clay and learned how to make art with my hands. That studio became my sanctuary. Through the rhythm of the wheel and the patience of the practice, I remembered what it meant to shape something lasting, while also confronting the impermanence of things. In later seasons, the craft would turn my tenderness to stone, shielding me from the chill of darker times. I began celebrating non-attachment with a thrill for the unpredictable.

Each project I created became a chapter of my own becoming—first The Missing Piece, then Made with Patience, then A Crock of Mischief. Eventually, the thread running through all of them found its name in me: Jennifer Lauren. It’s through that name that all my work now pours into the world.

Over time, art revealed itself as more than personal expression—it became a vessel for community. What began as a dare to live differently became a calling to build differently. I created DEEP SPACE as both a metaphor and a living ecosystem for creators learning to evolve beyond conformity and into self-sourced, generative economies. It’s where artists uncover their wealth—a way to turn ideas into matter, and matter into meaning.

Living those same principles gave rise to TOGETHERNESS, a neighborhood-style community I host across the metro Atlanta area. These gatherings carry a gentle, loving chaos — people arranging chairs, setting tables, sharing food — and somewhere between conversation and laughter, new friendships form. The echo of that laughter reminds me of how wealthy I truly am.

Today, my art and my business have become one practice: to serve as a bridge between the dream and the dreamer — handcrafting dreams into reality.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not at all. The hardest part has been releasing the mirage of what success is supposed to look like.

For years, I chased visibility, productivity, and income as proof that I was doing life “right.” But I eventually realized those metrics were illusions. The cost of rejecting my truth was always greater than money—it cost my health, my relationships, and my peace. Living in alignment with my body and my nervous system essentially cost me a career. What I built instead was a life and a home.

“Un-professionalizing” myself meant walking away from a 9-to-5 and claiming my identity as a creator. I learned to express more gratitude for the support and love that already surround me, and for the privilege of living a lifestyle that allows me to make art—and to help others make theirs.

My definition of work and value changed once I could claim my own boundaries and standards for how life would treat me. I began using my body as my compass for everything—movement, nourishment, rest, and connection to nature. My life stopped revolving around clocks and deadlines and began to revolve around the rhythm of creative urges, relationship, and honest joy.

The most humbling lesson about money has been realizing that it’s only one of many resources available to us. While money pays for what’s fixed, our relational and emotional wealth is what sustains us. Human connection, trust, and curiosity are currencies that keep replenishing themselves.

My stability now comes from faith in motion—from trusting that there will always be a new problem to solve, a new resource to manage, a new dream to build. Curiosity, I’ve learned, offers the highest returns.

Rebuilding trust after loss required remembering that I’m allowed to be wrong. Every misstep teaches me something new about how life wants to work with me. As long as I’m learning and creating, I’m thriving.

Today, I can honestly say: I have more than enough. My home, my family, and my business are all growing. And I’ve stopped measuring success by what I earn, and started measuring it by how deeply I live.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My work lives at the crossroads of art, community, and the unseen architecture of a person’s becoming. On paper, I’m a ceramic artist and community builder. In practice, I help people remember their own creative intelligence and build lives that feel like home.

I’m known for two things: TOGETHERNESS, which is the neighborhood-style community I host across metro Atlanta, and DEEP SPACE, the world of creative mythology that emerged through my ceramic Dragon Eggs.

TOGETHERNESS began as a simple desire to gather people—potlucks, workshops, rituals of everyday living. It has since grown into a warm constellation of strangers-turned-friends. We cook together, make art together, celebrate holidays together. It’s a soft landing place for anyone craving belonging, especially in a world that moves too fast for the human heart.

DEEP SPACE is entirely different—more mythic, more intimate. It began with my clay work. When I handcraft Dragon Eggs, I’m sculpting more than clay. I’m sculpting possibility. Each Egg becomes a symbolic vessel for a woman’s creative potential, her intuitive wealth, her next chapter. They carry stories, seasons, and initiations. And somehow, they always know who they belong to long before I do.

What sets me apart is that I don’t treat art or business as separate categories. I treat them as living systems. I approach creativity the way my grandparents approached woodworking or weaving—slow hands, deep attention, reverence for material and meaning. I see community as a form of artistry too. Every gathering, every ceremony, every handmade piece is a way of stitching people back into relationship with themselves and each other.

I’m most proud of the moments when people arrive to TOGETHERNESS or receive their Dragon Eggs with a full awareness of their belonging and their own creative power. I feel a strong sense of purpose to help people remember they are worthy of their own love, and that they don’t have to do it alone.

At the heart of everything I create is a simple truth: we are all makers. We are shaping our lives whether we realize it or not. My work is to help people make with intention, with intuition, with coherence—so their outer world matches the truth of who they are becoming.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
The next decade of the creative world is going to be defined by one thing above all else: a return to the body. We’re living in a moment where technology is accelerating faster than most people can integrate, and yet the deepest, most irreplaceable intelligence available to us is the human nervous system. AI will continue to evolve as a collaborator, amplifier, and occasionally a disruptor, but it will never surpass the creative essence of the artist. Tools can generate output. Only humans generate meaning.

What most artists don’t realize is that they are the highest-order technology on the planet. Their creative authority comes from depth of self-trust, emotional literacy, and somatic presence. If those foundations are unstable, their art becomes vulnerable to distortion, commodification, and influence from whatever algorithm or authority they’re unconsciously serving.

I think the future of art is going to shift sharply toward intimacy and ritual immersion.
People no longer want content. They want contact. They want the kind of creative presence that can only be felt in a room of breathing humans, in the ecstatic charge of shared experience. I see a rise in immersive performance, ceremonial theatre, communal making, and handcrafted sacred objects that hold memory in their very material. Digital saturation is making the analog more precious.

Handmade items will take on the role of heirlooms again—objects with a pulse, not just a price tag.

Micro-communities like TOGETHERNESS reveal a cultural hunger that can no longer be ignored. People miss having neighbors. They miss the ease of casual belonging. We’ve spent the last decade polarized, isolated, and touch-starved. Now the pendulum is swinging back toward small gatherings, creative guilds, and relational economies. The feminine economy is already rising—a shift from productivity to presence, from labor to lifestyle, from job security to community security.

What threatens creative authority today is disembodiment.
A nervous system running on stress, overstimulation, and digital addiction cannot create from truth. It can only react. When artists lose access to their bodies, they outsource authority to whatever system pays them or whatever content feeds them. The future demands the opposite: artists who are rooted, embodied, and sovereign.

Ten years from now, the wealthiest person in any room will be the artist.
Not because of money, but because of magnetism. Because of their ability to connect people, shape culture, build responsive systems, and generate meaning that technology cannot replicate. They will be the ones with the most relational capital, the clearest creative authority, and the deepest well of self-trust.

And in many ways, I’m already modeling that future.
Through TOGETHERNESS, I’m building in-person networks that live life in community again. Through DEEP SPACE and the Dragon Eggs, I’m showing creatives how to evolve beyond conformity and into sovereignty—how to make from the core of their being, not the approval of the marketplace. I’m helping people remember that they’re artists first, humans always, and that everything else—money, opportunity, impact—unfolds from that truth.

Pricing:

• $3,000 – Dragon Egg + DEEP SPACE Package
• $1,000 – Legacy Egg (Former)
• FREE – TOGETHERNESS Meetup

Contact Info:

• Website: jenniferlauren.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hellojenniferlauren/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenniferlauren.co
• Other: https://substack.com/@deepspaceincubatrix