Creative director of Completedworks Anna Jewsbury expresses a sculptural sensibility through jewellery and ceramics (opens in new tab) that adhere to playful design codes. The new collection, ‘Lunch Break’, encapsulates the complexity of the everyday in sensual forms that examine the relationship we have with public spaces.
The jewellery designer is fascinated by the way we respond to them physically and what we do when we are in them, whether perching on a bench chatting to a friend or eating a sandwich, and she translates these emotions and transient actions into the unexpected forms of her jewellery.
New Completedworks jewellery and ceramics
The pieces take the familiar – a baroque pearl, a drop earring – and subverts it, inviting a new interpretation. ‘There are certain styles we always come back to with each collection, which I actually really enjoy, that sense of repetition but in an iterative way,’ says Jewsbury. ‘I think it’s really important that each collection can be seen as a continuation and development of the last. We’ve been working again with bio-resin this season, which allows us to bring in the most beautiful colours alongside the pearl and gold hues. We recreate the shape of the natural baroque pearls using the bio-resin and then contrast them with clusters of classic freshwater pearls.’
The resulting collection, with its colourful accents, casts a hopeful tone. ‘Playful silhouettes flow elegantly and effortlessly in a series of pieces that present hidden creases, crumples and ruffles and explore the essence of texture and shape,’ Jewsbury adds. ‘Crumpled tin foil textures are inspired by a lecturer who ate a cheese and tomato sandwich every day in a university staff room between 1990 and 2005.’
It is a free-flowing aesthetic carried through to the ceramics, which are free from the obvious constraints of jewellery design: ‘There is always such a consideration for lightness when you are designing, for example, earrings, and it was quite freeing to be able to go in the opposite direction for once, making sure, for example, that a candlestick has enough weight. In creating ceramics you get this opportunity to mould with your hands – by squeezing, kneading, rolling and pulling.
‘You can’t always necessarily get this same physical satisfaction from making jewellery, where the movements of the hands are often slightly different. It was really this interest in the different hand movements during the process of crafting the work that started our interest in working with ceramics. I suppose it is a bit like a pianist wanting to pick up a violin.’
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