Why I Travel to Make Jewelry
Most people assume jewelry begins at a workbench. With tools, with metal, with a design already decided. For me, it begins much earlier — and usually somewhere far from the studio.
Travel is not a break from the work. It is the work. It starts with stillness.
Inspiration hexagon rocks collection
BACKGROUND I grew up understanding that meaningful things carry a history. My grandfather was a goldsmith. Every piece he made held a moment — a milestone, a person, a feeling that needed to exist in physical form. That stayed with me.
When I studied architecture, I learned to read the world differently. To see structure in organic things. To notice how a coral reef and a cathedral follow the same logic — growth through repetition, beauty through necessity. Nothing decorative for its own sake. Everything exactly as it needs to be.
That way of seeing didn't leave me when I moved from architecture into jewelry. It became the foundation of how I design.
And it's why I can't design from a mood board alone. I need to experience.
PROCESS When I travel, I'm not collecting aesthetics. I'm not just looking for a color palette or a shape to copy. I'm looking for questions.
What makes this landscape feel inevitable? Why does this rock formation feel ancient? What is the logic underneath this form and what happens if I translate that logic into metal?
Iceland has been calling for a long time. A place where the earth is still becoming itself. Where lava fields sit beside glaciers, where nothing is soft but everything has a strange, quiet beauty. It's a landscape that doesn't perform. It simply exists, with complete conviction.
That's the kind of design I'm drawn to. Pieces that don't ask for attention but hold it anyway. Forms that feel like they couldn't have been any other shape.
The trip isn't about coming home with a collection. It's about coming home with a deeper sense of what I'm trying to read and a handful of questions that will quietly shape the next body of work.
REVIEW / REFLECTION - I've learned that the best collections don't start with a brief. They start with an experience that you can't quite explain yet — something you saw, or felt, or stood inside of — that stays with you until it finds its form.
Travel slows that process down in the best possible way. It removes the pressure to produce and replaces it with permission to observe.
I'll be sharing what I find in Iceland through my newsletter: the unexpected references, the sketches, the moments where the landscape starts to speak in forms.
If you want to follow the process from the inside, you're welcome to join.
