For our collaboration, we handed over elements to each other to have the other make something. These elements are ornaments: sometimes from architecture, farm life, or filigree curls. They are small, sometimes delicate pieces of jewelry that demand proximity: ornament as connection.

I met Julie through her son about 15 years ago. The first time I visited her house. I closely studied all the small objects she has lying around on the edges of tables, shelves, cupboards and window sills. Admiring colors, materials and simple, elegant technical solutions, I thought “Wow, we exactly like the same things!” 

In 2024 we joined a filigrain course together where we worked with super flexible fine silver thread, learning to make sturdy elements and structures with them by shaping them in such a way that they have many points of connection. For the last 6 months we have been working together on jewellery. We started working together in Julie’s workshop in her family house in the south of France. We both brought materials, tools, ideas and elements. We laid them out and began shifting things around, a bit like starting a puzzle. 

The pieces that eventually came out from working together were assembled by exchanging half-ideas and combining elements. One person would bring in the start of something and give it to the other to continue working on. Our conversations were not about representation and meaning or why we made certain shapes, but much about ‘the how to’ of combining different materials and elements. Back in Amsterdam, we met weekly at Julies workshop and we also wrote to each other. We started referring to architectural elements, that upon studying their shape revealed exciting ways of connecting, supporting or opening. 

One of the works in the exhibition at Marzee, is not a piece of jewellery but a publication. All texts in there are fragments of the correspondence between me and Julie during our working period together. They speak about practical things such as when we plan to what, how the soldering is going, it includes a recipe for surface depletion for low carat gold, but they also contemplate ornament as a bordering mechanism. Or differently put; as a means for highlighting and celebrating areas where differences come together, which in our collaboration is the mechanism where our work stems from and refers back to.