About

My inspiration & motivation….

Influenced & inspired by Bauhaus, Deco & Futurist Design, I see my jewellery as an extension of my art practices. For me, making jewellery is like working on a small sculpture designed to be displayed on the body. Much like the Bauhaus philosophy of form meeting function jewellery gives me the freedom to break away from the conceptual & focus on the development of practice & skill. 

I’ve always loved jewellery for as long as I can remember. My Austrian auntie had a collection of beautiful very expensive jewellery and when I visited her as a child, the first thing I would say was “treasure!” She would then, smile, nod & let me rummage through her jewellery box. She was a very fashionable woman and had a very modernist sense of style. Combinations of silver, gold, oxidised, set with wonderful stones would make me dream at night of finding caskets of buried treasure.

Another early influence were my visits to museums. My parents took me regularly to the V&A, the Natural History Museum and the British Museum. I would stare through the glass cabinets in awe at the Egyptian adornments, trying to figure out how each piece was made, then try to replicate it in copper wire. My mother, an artist herself, would bring home discarded coloured electrical wire, which I would fashion into African style necklaces & earrings and sell at my primary school car boot sale.

My other interests were rock crystals and fossils. At the Natural History Museum the collections were fascinating to me. A perfectly formed sea plant in stone, a trapped beetle in amber or a fossilized opal snail, looked like they had been carved by hand, but in reality they were just a moment of another place in time. I began to look at the history of jewellery from carved tribal artifacts, Chinese figurines or Roman Saxon signet rings. All the time trying to figure out how they were made and it was this continuous questioning that has I believe brought me to where I am now. I am currently working in precious metals and am carving and setting gemstones.