When she thinks up a new design, she starts with the nature of the unworked stone; she pairs it with metal, wood, and leather to build a prototype which she will construct and deconstruct until its weight, its balance, its structure is just right. For Eva, jewellery is the wearable fusion of creativity with the material. It is never about the material on its own. Eva prefers brass to gold and raw rubies to polished diamonds, because her pieces are not about ostentation, wealth or financial status. They are about art, personality and harmony.
Those who wear Eva’s jewellery find that the process of choosing the right piece is as subtle as that of buying a new dress. What attracts at first may not be right; what lies simply, naturally on the wearer’s bosom is not always obvious. But when the fit is found, a bond is created between the piece and its wearer, a bond that is strong because it is true. Few of Eva’s pieces languish in jewellery boxes. They are exuberantly alive, and are worn naturally by those whose personality they serve.
Eva has an exceptional mind, a mind that thinks in shapes and textures rather than words or images. When she sees a stone, a leaf, or a piece of coral smoothed by endless waves, she perceives a body, a volume, in all its shapeliness. Her mind picks the object up, manipulates it, turns it in all directions. Unconsciously, she seizes the object’s immanent nature. How it will behave if seized, if brought close to another object, if paired to it. In Eva’s world, a stone has beauty in its raw form. Her task is to reveal its harmony, to let the light play with its imperfections, to use its raw nature to reveal the wearer’s own.
Eva’s mind is that of the drystone waller, who knows how a multitude of oddly shaped rocks will fit together to make a wall that will withstand centuries of sun, wind and weather. She approaches the natural world in the manner of Andy Goldsworthy, with the deep respect of the worshipper. Every stone, every object, has a nature that is true to itself. Overworking it would be false, a violation.
It is that tension between nature and architecture, between raw stones and brass structures, that transforms her jewellery and brings it to life.
P. Worms
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