On making things that last

How did you get into jewelry design?

I got into it in a sort of roundabout way. I did my master’s in textiles. I had changed course a lot, and still textiles didn’t feel quite right. Then for a project, I did a weeklong thing in the jewelry department. I really loved the scale of it, how tiny it is. The technicians were much friendlier and nicer in the jewelry department. I started making a few little bits to escape what I was supposed to be doing. I gave some rings I made for friends for their birthdays. It felt like it fitted into my life a bit more than the other stuff I’d been doing. It felt more meaningful and more immediate. When I left school I was making these big rugs for incredibly expensive, quite fusty stores in London. It just felt like the wrong world. I was doing that for ages, and I had this kind of brainwave, like, “I should be making jewelry.” I remember realizing that it’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of that before?

It can be hard to come to that realization. Some people live their whole lives and don’t come to it.

I think it felt too easy. It was right in front of me. But I went down this route of, “I’m going to really struggle. I’m going to make stuff that takes up a lot of space and is really laborious and hard to sell.”

What do you think is behind the desire to do something difficult?

I’m not sure. I do that quite a lot in my life, making things harder than they should be.

I love jewelry as a medium because, like you said, it’s something you give to someone. It relies on an interaction with it. What is attractive to you about that element of use and wearability?

Jewelry is charged with meaning. I’m surprised by how many people have trusted me with making pieces in memory of people they’ve lost. Seeing them wear that jewelry every day—that sentimentality or emotional charge still blows me away a bit.

And the idea of heirlooms living on way past you.

I’m working with people’s heirlooms. I’ve had a commission recently where I’d been given a load of rings from someone’s grandma, and then they wanted me to make pendants for her and her mum and her sisters. Lots of the rings had actually been cut off her grandma’s fingers. So that’s very charged.

What do you need to make sure you get right in that scenario?

Respecting the history and intent.

What is the process of creating one of your original pieces?

It varies a lot. With figurative pieces, it’s more straightforward. I’ll see something I like, like an old drawing or a painting, and that directly turns into a piece of jewelry. Then there’s another way where I work, where I don’t necessarily have an image or idea in my head—it’s wanting to come across a shape or a form by chance, by playing.

What is your inspiration process like for figurative pieces?

A lot of online archives—for the Met, and the British Museum, and the V&A—have been a huge inspiration. When I feel a bit stuck or lost, that’s where I go. The place I keep going back to at the moment is a museum in London called the Foundling Museum. It was an orphanage a long time ago and they have this collection of objects. They’re kind of jewelry, but they’re actually just small tokens. When one of the mothers dropped off their child to this orphanage, often they were illiterate so they didn’t write their name or contact, they left an object with the baby. It’s all documented. It’s painfully heartbreaking. There are coins with holes drilled in, or there’s a beautiful carved wooden nut. They’re humble objects. They’re not expensive things but they become hugely important.

What is appealing to you about humility in a design object?

When I saw those pieces, it really struck me that this is why I do what I do. Showing love through a small object is the essence of what I do. Sometimes that’s through incredibly laborious figurative work, but sometimes it’s just a piece of wire that I’ve twisted. That can be just as precious.

Jewelry is so incredibly personal and so much about the person wearing it. Even the way the metal warms up to someone’s body heat. It becomes a part of you. When [jewelry] works well it makes me feel more like me. That feels like a beautiful thing to be a part of: that someone could buy a piece of my jewelry and feel stronger, or protected.

How do you structure your time? When in the week will you dip out to a museum?

I feel quite chaotic with my time. I might start the day trying to keep the e-comm orders up, and then I’ll get inspired by something I want to make… There’s not much rhyme or reason to it. Whenever I step out of the studio and go look at things, I realize I should do it more.

I’ve got a very stressful situation with my accounts at the moment, so I’ve just spent a whole day going through receipts and paperwork that have been stuffed into a giant folder. I’ve had to really coax myself into doing it with biscuits and bribery.

Do you want to get to a point where you’re offloading that part of your business? Or are you happy to be the sole person in control?

I have wanted to keep it that way for a while. That’s why I stepped away from being stocked in too many places and instead took on more commissions, to have less output.

Why is it important for you to be in charge of the artistic product?

I think I just don’t know any other way.

Your jewelry feels very contemporary and wearable, so I’m curious about the influence of medieval imagery. How do you marry different visual languages?

One of my tutors at the RCA [Royal College of Art] said, “If something is just good taste, or just beautiful, then it becomes bad taste.” The way to create your own aesthetic and identity is to mix things up. It should be ugly and beautiful, should have some kind of push and pull, and some level of extreme, for it to feel fresh. I’m quite careful to do that. I don’t want things to look too medieval, or too delicate, or too feminine. There has to be a split, somehow.

The golden rule of high-low.

Particularly with style—my friends who I think are so stylish, and people I see out and about—there’s always an element of surprise. Like, incredibly beautiful tailored trousers with really scruffy, grubby trainers. And then on the wrong person, that could look contrived.

How do you think about your work in terms of fashion and style versus art and craft? Is it a binary?

I like sitting somewhere outside of all of it. Or maybe it’s being part of all of it. Being too much a part of the fashion world feels wrong for my jewelry because I don’t make stuff seasonally. I want someone to buy something that they’ll want to wear forever, or at least a long time. I don’t like the idea that what I make would be just a trend. And then being too a part of the craft world, I want it to feel fresh and relevant.

You’ve worked for fashion houses, like designer Chopova Lowena. What is your approach to collaboration?

It always feels exciting to step inside someone else’s world. It feels nice to delve into someone else’s references and not have to search so much inward. Working with other designers helps me solidify more who I am. Whenever I have done a collaboration, often when it’s over I’m excited to do my own stuff. It gives me fuel.

For a long time I had a part-time job alongside my work, and I miss the feeling of when I got to my studio and time felt so precious. It was such a relief to be in my own space, doing my own work. And now it’s just me in my studio full-time, and although it is great and I’m so glad to have the time, I do kind of miss it feeling like a real luxury.

I’m curious about your space and how you’ve made it yours.

That’s something I’ve thought a lot about the last few months because I was leaving a shared space that was in an old estate in Elephant & Castle. It had gotten to a crunch point where it didn’t feel very safe to be there. A lot of the flats above it were abandoned and I felt like I couldn’t be there at night. I decided that I needed somewhere safe and warm, which is actually quite hard to find in London, in terms of studio space. I told a friend that’s what I was looking for and she was like, “Good luck with that,” joking, because it feels impossible.

Because everywhere has warehouse vibes?

Yeah, or the other end of the spectrum, which is horribly corporate. I absolutely can’t do that and can’t afford that. Also, being in a shared space with people who were furniture designers, all three of us were very, very busy and the way we operated wasn’t working. I wanted to make a space that felt very calm. It really has changed how I work. I love having wall space to hang things up. [Before] my space was just functional. I hadn’t thought about how my space looked or how it made me feel. I do that in my home, but I wasn’t doing it for my workspace. It’s improved my day-to-day life and in the last few months I’ve become a lot more happy with my work. It feels more me. I’m sure that’s connected to this space.

What were some of the design choices that were crucial?

A window. I have a really amazing view, actually. I can see a lot of green, and I can see helicopters land at a hospital. It feels quite dramatic. I feel connected to the world and reality but I’m high up so I’m also not.

Jewelry has always seemed to have a high technical barrier to entry, to me. How did you overcome that?

It came quite naturally to me. I’ve always been a maker and I’ve always loved working on a small scale. At the same time, when I first started working with the special jewelers’ wax, it felt really uncomfortable and frustrating. It tested my ability and patience. But the more I persevered, the more I knew my capabilities within it. I’m still learning on the job, I still come up against stuff that’s frustrating. I’m self-taught through YouTube mostly, and I assisted a jeweler to get the basics down.

What role does material play in your practice?

It’s funny how different something will feel in silver or gold, and you just have to experiment. Some things will make more sense in silver. Sometimes I’ll get commissions in 18- or 24-karat gold and you kind of understand the obsession with gold when you work with it—the way it heats up and glows. It does feel like magic, this kind of alchemy.

Ugh, I’ve been rewatching Harry Potter movies this week, so don’t get me started.

I often feel like going to Hatton Garden, which is the jewelry district in London, is like going to Diagon Alley.

I’m obsessed.

It does feel like a time warp there. A lot of the stuff for sale you couldn’t find online. It’s all word of mouth, what places stock what materials and things. You have to know where to go and what to ask for. It’ll be a buzzer you have to ring and then you go up three flights of stairs to these weird spaces. I find that part of the job very intimidating.

Now that you’re not stocked in so many boutiques, I imagine you rely more on interfacing with customers on social media. How do you approach that?

I still find Instagram quite complicated. For a while I felt like I had the knack of it. I had built quite a following—then in the last couple of years it’s felt harder to reach people. And the amount of time that I’m on it doesn’t feel very healthy. I struggle with knowing how much to share and how much of myself to share. Some of the accounts that I follow of designers, the ones that I really relate to, seem to have a light touch with that. They share stuff of them making things, and you see the space, and it doesn’t feel like too curated. Recently, I deleted a lot of stuff on my Instagram because I wanted it to feel cleaner, a bit less of me and more about the jewelry. It feels like a delicate balance to strike.

There’s an academic who has this theory of the “visibility bind” for creators on social media: you need to show yourself for the algorithm to platform you, but by showing yourself you’re opening the door to criticism, or worse.

It can make you feel very vulnerable, posting something you’ve made. Even something like a commission that I’m really pleased with and the customer loves, if I then post it and it doesn’t get that much interaction, it can devalue it. And that was never the intention for this piece of jewelry. It has done what it was supposed to do. Instagram is extra.

Do you ever feel sad to have to give away your work?

Yeah, oh yeah. At the moment I’ve been sourcing one-off pieces of old stone from antique markets. I don’t really want to sell them because I’ll never find another one. When I’ve made something, I feel like, ‘Well, I could make something similar again.’ But if it’s something hard to find that someone else made, I want to keep it!

How do you handle pricing?

Pricing has been really tough and complicated. When I first started my work, everything was a little too cheap because I didn’t have the confidence to charge higher prices for it—to charge what it was worth. Then when I was stocked in places, I had to make it way more expensive, even simple silver pieces, just to make it viable. Selling wholesale, I have to almost quadruple the prices. But I had a complete disconnect with the customer. They weren’t people I knew who could afford it. I’d started out by selling to friends and I missed that immediacy and positivity. Now I’m trying to find somewhere in the middle of being able to stock the higher price point pieces because that’s where I don’t have the reach. And it makes sense that those would be in a beautiful boutique or concept store. Then I can keep the more simple pieces and commissions direct through me.

I think putting a price on stuff is the worst part of the job. For jewelry to feel precious, it has to be expensive. You want it to be slightly out of your reach, but not too far out of your reach. That’s why I wouldn’t mass-produce.

You can tell when something is mass-produced, is one of one million on Amazon.

It’s like it lost its soul, almost. I have done some computer-aided design. Sometimes for setting stones or jewels, it’s very useful. But I feel slightly torn. It’s good to be able to use that stuff to your advantage and not just be stubborn and hand-make everything for the sake of it. I don’t want to be too much of a luddite. But I also feel like with CAD stuff I can feel it. I’m suspicious of it. It doesn’t feel quite right. When things are 3D-printed, it doesn’t have relation to reality. When you’re making jewelry with your hands, you have a sense of its relation to your body and you understand how it feels as you go.