Throughout the week, you won’t find Joyce Marchand sitting behind a desk at a nine-to-five job. Instead, you can find her in her backyard, wearing safety goggles while cutting, welding, and grinding metal.
Joyce is the owner and sole artist of Inspire Me Artworks, which sells flame-painted, etched, and painted patina jewelry and sculptures, typically made of recycled copper. While Joyce lives in Washington, Missouri, her handmade artwork is sold across the Midwest in shops, at craft shows, and on Etsy.
“I came out of the womb being a businesswoman,” Joyce says.
However, her journey as an artist started before, she touched metalworking. During a high school interior design class, a teacher noticed she had an “eye for design” and pushed her to pursue it, Joyce says. So, in 2005, she attended St. Louis Community College Meramec for photography and design and then became a photographer, but a few years later, she decided to go in a new direction.
Joyce began taking metalsmithing and flame painting classes. Flame painting, which she now uses for the majority of her art, creates patterns and colors on metal by using just a torch.
Even though she had only made seven pieces in her classes, a friend urged her to sell them at an art show in Chesterfield. After the show, she was hooked on the business side of art. “I just decided, why not turn it into a business? I love doing it,” she says.
In the last 10 years, Joyce has further pursued metalsmithing and flame painting and is also trained in welding, blacksmithing, lapidary, and wire wrapping.
As she has honed her craft with training and practice, Joyce has been able to expand her artistic style to include African, southwest, and aboriginal designs. Joyce says she “incorporates colors and designs from all over the world.”
She also has designs inspired by nature, featuring bumblebees, horses, cacti, dragonflies, and butterflies. “Just designs that God’s given us here on the earth to enjoy,” Joyce says.
Her growing portfolio of artistic endeavors certainly seems to reflect her business motto: “Be unique. Be different. Be one of a kind.”
“It’s very extraordinary that she has done this all by herself,” says Rick Marchand, Joyce’s husband.
“I’m really proud of where I came [from], but I know there’s a lot more things to explore,” Joyce says. “I’m just looking forward to the future to kind of play around with the sculpture and see where that goes.”
Visit Inspire Me Artworks at Etsy.com/shop/Inspiremeartworks. Inspire Me Artwork’s handcrafted metal goods are also available at Missouri Life Mercantile in Rocheport, WashMo On The Go, and Scarlett’s Riverside Boutique in Washington, Gallery Zeke in Steelville, and Hermann Mercantile in Hermann.
To purchase Inspire Me Artworks products on the Missouri Life website, click here.
All photos courtesy of Inspire Me Artworks.
This article was originally published in the January/February 2025 issue of Missouri Life.
