Relevant jewelry knowledge

Jewellery doesn’t have to be treasure to be treasured. Liz Forsyth meets four young designers who make collectable pieces out of unpromising beginnings …

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009

The jeweller who best mixed the precious with the mundane was himself a bit of a mash-up. Andrew Grima, who died in 2007 aged 86, was born in Italy, raised in Britain, and spent the latter part of his career in Switzerland. From the late 1950s on, and with no professional training, he pioneered just about everything that is now regarded as modern in jewellery: texturing gold, not buffing it smooth; jamming huge, uncut gems into wildly theatrical settings; and in particular treating common-or-garden materials as if they were superstars, displaying tourmalines as extravagantly as D-flawless diamonds, and polishing wood as lovingly as platinum.

Grima had an artist’s desire to explore the possibilities of all solid matter, however apparently pedestrian, and it’s no accident that three of the four young jewellers featured here have spent time at art school. All are determined to extend the boundaries of what jewellery can and should be made of. Old watch mechanisms? Yes. Walrus teeth? No problem. They have a democratic disregard for the old divisions of precious, semi-precious and base, mixing and matching materials as a sculptor might. So while buying such pieces as investment is something of a punt—a mammoth-tusk ring may not be so reliably a girl’s best friend as a diamond—they are beautiful. And that’s worth putting your money on.

BIBI VAN DER VELDEN
When she was a child, Bibi van der Velden’s Dutch parents took her to live in a “magical house”. A Victorian pile in rural Surrey, it had its own ghost (a little girl in a pink dress), a tunnel that led underground to a nearby church and, most excitingly for a child whose imagination was fired by treasures, a “box of artefacts: documents going back to the 1500s, goblets, ivory pipes, shards of pottery, a single, faded velvet shoe”.

Bibi (right) is 29 now, a sculptor and goldsmith with a no-nonsense manner who lives in the sensible heart of the Netherlands; but the gothic romance of that box and its contents still animate her work. In her “wearable art” collection, she interlaces slightly macabre objects found in flea markets—tiny, porcelain doll’s hands, a cuff of spidery lace, cameo buttons peachy with age—with rock crystals, teeth, baroque pearls and shell to create neckpieces and cuffs that are both delicate, and delicately threatening.

More recently, those ivory pipes seem to have taken hold. For the past year, she’s been carving jewellery from single pieces of fossilised mammoth tusk, reveal­ed by the melting Siberian permafrost and preserved with a special wax sourced from the British Museum. Though cold-blooded reptiles dominate the designs—tiny snakes hatch from egg-shaped pendants, dragons are studded with warty tsavorites—the milky warmth of the mam­moth ivory keeps the overall effect strangely tender, and make for pieces that look just as well worn by men as women. Or ghosts.

From top (lead picture): tusk and tsavorite earrings, £2,985; pearl and mother-of-pearl “tooth” necklace, £1,345; tusk and tsavorite ring, £1,095.

HEMMERLE
The Hemmerle family are used to the pretty and the glittery: according to Christian (right)—at 29, their youngest member—in the 19th century they tended to Bavaria’s crown jewels, and for many years after retailed high-end diamond jewellery from their Munich shop. Then, in the late 1990s, Stefan Hemmerle, Christian’s father, had an epiphany. A client asked him to design some pieces for his wife, who, somewhat forbiddingly, “didn’t like jewellery”. The result—a torque of thick black iron, set at the ends with two huge, mismatched diamonds—broke all the rules and set the family firm on an entirely new course. “It was like a door opening,” Christian says, his voice whispery with excitement. “All these ideas flooded through.”

The four Hemmerles—father, mother Sylveli, Christian and, latterly, his tiny-boned, decorative Egyptian wife, Yasmin—have spent the years since riding that flood. Though these days Christian clearly leads the way, they design as a team, producing about 400 unique pieces a year, studding bases of wood or oxidised metal with sweetie-like stones in arty, back-to-front colours: black jade, amber moonstones, lime-green garnets. There’s a tension in their work between an almost Wagnerian heroic formality and a more eastern lushness that I suspect comes from Yasmin: one minute they might set a large, cut aquamarine of an Aryan blue into an iron bangle of fierce single-mindedness, the next twist hundreds of tiny, polished carnelian beads into a bejewelled rope finished with polished ends of thuja wood.

In pictures, these pieces can appear a little remote; with prices averaging from €5,000-40,000 that’s perhaps not surprising. Yet in the (stony, woody) flesh they have warmth and a surprisingly tactile appeal. You want to stroke them, weigh them in your palm, put them on, and not take them off.

Christian is delighted to hear it. The Hemmerle family’s work may have been considered intellectually stimulating enough to be exhibited at the notoriously discerning Neue Sammlung, Munich’s museum of design, but Christian just wants you to wear it. “Our jewellery is meant to be on the body,” he smiles, as polished as a pair of his own coral cuff­links. “Then it can grow and develop. If a customer says to me I want to buy a piece to wear once and then put it in a safe, I will tell them to give it back and go away.”

From top: copper, white gold and tourmaline earrings; coral, copper and pink gold bangles; white gold ring with copper, spinel and sapphires.

LUCY HUTCHINGS
“I’ve always been very three-dimensional,” says Lucy Hutchings, a lively, clear-headed 28-year-old (right). “I grew up in the Suffolk countryside and was always fiddling about creating things out of natural materials I’d find in the garden.” She went on to join the wood, metals, ceramics and plastics course at Brighton university, “because I was passionate about working with materials”. For her degree show, for which she earned a first, she mixed feathers, fur and butterfly wings—and the feathers have stuck. Literally: for her first two collections, sold in London by Liberty and the East End boutique Start, Hutchings glues the quill ends of iridescent feathers one by one onto wooden balls “in the same pattern they grow on the bird”, then wraps them tightly in a fine silk tulle. These peacocky beads are then trapped in metal cage-like structures and attached to transparent rubber tubing or suspended from ribbons; the net prevents the feathery texture becoming the issue, and instead allows the shifting colours to take centre stage, like petrol on the surface of a puddle.

Like all the jewellers here, Hutchings seems to get as much pleasure and excitement from gathering her materials as from the designing. While the Hemmerles go misty-eyed about the “emotional” joy of finding stones that “speak”, Lucy admits to spending months filling “tray after tray with things from all over the place: fabric stores, bead shops, markets. Then I start playing.”

Her best work is supersized—her big-bead and geometric “breastplate” necklaces may cost upwards of £400, but they have a confidence and presence missing from her smaller-scale, less expensive rings and pendants. Nonetheless, she’s determined to offer pieces at all prices; at least for now. When I asked her about the future, she admitted that she’d love to work with diamonds. “But finding one big enough might be a problem.”

From top: glass and crystal earrings, £135; shell pearl and gold-plate ring, £85; feathered bead, rubber and gold-plate necklace, £490.

JESSICA MCCORMACK
Of the four jewellers here, Jessica McCormack (right) a slim and frankly beautiful 30-year-old New Zealander—probably edges closest to the traditional. Her work always includes diamonds somewhere along the line; her rings won’t take anybody’s eye out if you gesture too wildly at a social event; and she calls her necklaces “necklaces”, not neckpieces, breastplates or capes. Yet for all its wearability, her work has a gritty edge, gently poking fun at the pretension of haute joaillerie while still indulging man’s (and particularly woman’s) jackdaw love of all things sparkly and expensive.

Like both van der Velden and Hutchings, McCormack is a compulsive collector of stuff—she sells her jewellery from a by-appointment-only “salon”, a room of wonders in east London throbbing with alternative treasures she’s found, all of which are for sale. She also came to designing by an unusual route; after studying art history, she started her career as an intern in the Victorian jewellery department of Sotheby’s in London. Fascinated by the clarity and purity of the gemstones, but put off by their fusty, fussy settings, she started sketching drawings of diamond jewellery that, she says, “younger people could wear”.

She wins the youth vote several ways. One is urban references: a ring of rectangular diamonds stacked like the New York skyline, or a pair of orb-and-spike earrings that echo the shape of London’s Telecom Tower while remaining bewitchingly feminine. Another is to combine the wink of white diamonds with the where-there’s-muck pragmatism of brass and old watch parts. She may set a single stone in a cogwheel and mount it on a leather strap for a transgender take on the bracelet. Or she inserts what she calls “hidden” diamonds into the ends of Victorian pocketwatch-winders, hanging them on delicate chains to make pendants that look particularly effective worn in multiples, dog-tag style, with jeans and a plain shirt. The result is cool, rock ’n’ roll—and very collectable.

From top: diamond, yellow gold and feather earrings, £15,000; multi-key pendant, silver, brass and round diamond, £1,500; gold gilt chain, £550; round pocket-watch key pendant, silver, brass and heart-shaped diamond, £1,750; square antique pocket-watch key, silver, brass with round diamond, £400.

 

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