BEFORE THE GARDEN
I was an engineer.
By education and by profession. Years in a discipline where things are meant to hold, where a tolerance is the answer and there is a correct way to reach it.
I'd have asked you what the application was, if you'd told me I would end up painting flowers that don't exist.
EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED NEXT
The Shift
My twins were born in 2020, into a year with its doors shut. Somewhere in the middle of it I lost track of myself entirely.
I bought paints, because painting was the one hour of the day nobody else was inside. Botanicals, from life — until around the fourth wash they'd stop being real and become a garden that grows nowhere.
Then a commission for a silk scarf. A wall motif. Instagram full of people asking where they could get it. I learned printing sophisticated enough to hold a watercolour without flattening it. Then I wanted the paintings to be things you could wear.
WHY JEWELLERY
A print is something you look at. A ring is something you live in.
You choose it in the morning and wear it through whatever the day turns out to be, until it stops being an object you own and becomes part of how you look to yourself. I wanted to make things that aren't bought and forgotten in a drawer — things that hold on to who you were when you chose them, and remind you of it on the days life throws its curveballs.
I know what it is to lose that thread. That's the whole reason I make these.
If minimalism isn't your cup of tea.
Jewellery has spent a decade getting quieter, sold on the promise that the best accessory is the one nobody notices. That's never been mine. I make things for people who want their accessories to be part of their identity, not a hedge against having one.
If you'd rather be a garden than a beige room — you're who I've been painting for.