My first jewellery collection began with a feeling. The reflective wonder of an illusion. The split-second before you understand what you’re seeing. The moment that you ask: is that real?
It felt like a question I ask myself more and more.
Reflective Bodies is an art jewellery collection exploring illusion, reflection, and distortion. The motif's draw from two temporal extremes: the ornamentation of medieval armour and weaponry - spikes, metalwork, forms built for protection and a speculative minimalism that imagines forms from the future. These references collide in the body of work, producing objects that feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic. Artefacts from a moment in time where the past and future meet. Which is, I think, where we are.
What is art jewellery?
Contemporary jewellery, sometimes called art jewellery, is a roughly 70 year old art movement sitting at the intersection of jewellery and contemporary art. It prioritises the maker’s studio practice, conceptual intent and material experimentation over conventional design. Pieces are understood as thought objects: wearable propositions rather than accessories. They are designed to provoke a thought or conversation between the wearer and the observer.
By its nature, this design practice is self-reflexive. It questions something about jewellery itself, about body adornment, or about the socio-political context in which it’s made. The topic depending on the philosophy and interests of the practitioner.
My contemporary jewellery practice is rooted in a simple observation: body adornment appears to be an innate human behaviour. Some of the earliest artefacts ever found, across cultures, continents and history are pieces worn on the body for various reasons. No other animal seems to do this, and that strikes me as a genuinely important question. Why do humans feel the need to adorn themselves? Is it a form of language? Is it the impulse to create, to communicate? Whatever the answer, humans have always adorned their bodies. And to me, that is a beautiful thing.
I feel that jewellery connects humans across time and space, and this is what informs my design language.
The Inspiration
When I began researching the concept for Reflective Bodies, one reference kept surfacing: M.C. Escher. Specifically, his 1935 lithograph Hand with Reflecting Sphere. A work famous for its exploration of self-observation and impossible spatial representation. Escher intuitively communicated complex mathematical ideas through art, layering these ideas with decorative storytelling elements that pulls you into his impossible worlds.
I wanted to re-create the feeling of looking into a small sterling silver sphere held in your hand and seeing your entire world curved back at you …compressed, distorted, present. As the collection developed, additional pieces introduced historical motifs: spiked forms, twisted wire, shapes that reference armour. The tension between the reflective and the ancient, the minimal and the exaggerated is where the work lives.
The Making
Every piece in Reflective Bodies is handmade in my studio using techniques that are, in some cases, thousands of years old. Forging, doming, wire drawing, soldiering, hand-finishing. These are the same fundamental processes that produced the medieval objects the collection references.
Where modern technology enters, it does so in service of the concept rather than in place of craft. CAD allows me to repeat symmetrical forms across the collection. Each piece accumulates hours of hand work: forging, filing, soldering, and the painstaking process of bringing sterling silver to a mirror polish, which on curved and irregular surfaces demands patience that can’t be automated.
The result is beautiful, wearable objects that create an opportunity for a moment of quiet reflection.
Reflective Bodies is available now. Made to Order pieces from the collection are able to be ordered through my website.