Very short statements:

Ko Jou Chen — MFA (Coursework), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Portable Passages explores the quiet rituals of domestic space and the ways objects can hold stillness, comfort and presence. Resting between adornment and sculpture, the three forms suggest containers or ornaments that may be worn, held, offered or simply observed. Twisted wires of brass, copper and fine silver are combined using the traditional technique of married metals, creating patterned surfaces through soldering, filing and rolling.

Flynn Parker-Greer — BFA Gold and Silversmithing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Parker-Greer’s work explores construction, precision and spatial interplay through industrial fabrication, traditional jewellery techniques and computer-aided design. Drawing on the geometry, repetition and sharp lines of architecture, the Beyond the Surface series contrasts restrained geometric exteriors with complex, immersive interiors. Precious materials are subordinated while industrial materials are elevated, challenging conventional hierarchies of value. The Black as Night series reimagines pinwheel galaxies to evoke satellite pollution and the cosmic vastness of unknown futures.

Katarina Ekart — Master’s graduate, Jewellery Department, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium Cross Twist Pin Cross explores the desire for slowness within a world shaped by rapid consumption and disappearance. Through crossing, twisting, pinning and threading, repeated hand gestures allow time to accumulate in the surface. Handmade lace is placed on disposable materials such as shopping bags, paper towels and plastic gloves, bringing patient labour into contact with objects designed for immediate use. By revealing the needle, bobbin and structures behind lace-making, Ekart presents ornament as a lingering trace of a practice gradually disappearing.

Sophia Oberhauser — MA Jewellery Design, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium Shadow Lace enters a world shaped by patterns, grids and underlying structures. Inspired by crocheted lace trims from Austrian curtains, Oberhauser reflects on textile practices linked to women and domestic life. Braided steel and melted glass beads translate repetition, labour and care into jewellery and objects that move between softness and strength, ornament and structure. Lace becomes a form of protection that filters light, shields intimacy and transforms the spaces we inhabit.

Hugo Pieszczoch — BA, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium Pieszczoch’s work explores the duality between the polished persona we present to the world and the raw, unscripted reality that lies beneath. Subsurface plays with the internal leakage of impulses, anxieties, aggressions, and desires that social performance compels us to suppress. Wearable pieces that respond to these inner states provoke a question: what new etiquette emerges when the hidden becomes visible — one of honesty, or merely irony?

Yasmine Lemmens — MA Object and Jewellery Design, Hogeschool PXL-MAD, Hasselt, Belgium Interwoven revitalises traditional textile techniques such as weaving, crocheting and braiding through a contemporary jewellery approach. Atypical materials, digital drawing and laser techniques generate three-dimensional structures in which textile becomes the skeleton and building block of the work. Soft materials meet hard industrial elements such as metal wire, nylon and plastic, creating tension between the tactile and the technological. Moving between jewellery, fashion and sculpture, the works bring tradition and innovation together.

Into Niilo — MFA Open Senses, Hogeschool PXL-MAD, Hasselt, Belgium Unfocused Fears in Disguise brings together a selection of jewellery and objects developed over the past several years. The works share an interest in hiding, revealing and the difficulty of making something fully legible. The objects contain texts that are concealed within their own structures. They need to be opened, rearranged, examined or viewed from another position before the words can be read. What initially appears to be a simple object becomes a small system for decoding. The works move between personal doubt, mourning, identity, fear and the absurdity of trying to make sense of things. What is hidden becomes readable only when the object is approached and opened.

Dilara Maria Schirinzi — MA Object and Jewellery Design, Hogeschool PXL-MAD, Hasselt, Belgium Dilara Maria Schirinzi’s The Shape of Waiting encompasses a series of mourning jewellery in which filigree images, written messages, children’s drawings, floral blueprints, and vanitas imagery come together. The jewellery explores not only mourning but also the phase preceding it: holding onto memories, cherishing final moments of closeness, and learning to cope with the impending loss. Fragile fragments of memory are assembled into narrative jewellery. They honour life, even beyond death.

Alyssa Wakim — MFA, Jewellery, Sint Lucas Antwerpen, Belgium Fusion of Cultures & Generations in Jewelry explores identity, heritage and the connections between generations. Drawing on Belgian and Lebanese family histories, Wakim selects inherited jewellery from both sides of her family as the basis for new designs. AI-generated forms help reinterpret, rather than reproduce, the ornaments, details and shapes of these heirlooms. The resulting cuff bracelets can be worn separately or together as a sleeve, bringing different cultures, memories and generations into one continuous narrative.

Flora Pagliarani — BA, HEAD Genève (Haute École d’Art et de Design), Geneva, Switzerland Family jewellery — passed down, sometimes damaged, incomplete, or simply no longer worn — forms the starting point for Pagliarani’s collection Archeologia familiare. Each inherited piece is observed, then enclosed within blown borosilicate glass: a material that reveals what it contains whilst seeming to suspend a trace in time. The glass form echoes the original object without reproducing it exactly, much as memory distorts and fragments what it preserves. Old jewellery thus changes state whilst retaining its function — a ring remains a ring, a brooch a brooch — held in place within the transparency of glass like a persistent but elusive presence.

Yuting Shao — MA, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing, China Garments worn by Chinese female migrant workers in the 1990s form the material and emotional foundation of Shao’s practice. Drawing on the experiences of her mother and female relatives who left home for factory work in coastal cities during China’s Reform and Opening-up, she transforms period clothing and found objects into wearable pieces that carry the forms of contemporary professional dress. Fragments of actual migrant workers’ letters are embedded in the work as lived voices, reconnecting two generations navigating uncertain futures. The pieces propose that ordinary objects and private words can hold what history tends to overlook.

Wanda Gabrielová — Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic For Geometry – Source, System, Order, Principle, Wanda Gabrielová draws on the changing character of her family garden, translating its colours, rhythms and seasonal transformations into jewellery. From the wintry palette of Hoarfrost to the shifting structures of Variability and Flower Phenology, geometric forms and Czech glass beads evoke the ordered yet unpredictable life of perennial planting. Her work captures nature as a continuous process of growth, change and return.

Markéta Masnicová — Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic Markéta Masnicová’s In the Eyes of Theatre turns eyewear into a vehicle for character, transformation and performance. Developed for a theatrical interpretation of Joan of Arc, the collection follows Joan as maiden, warrior and saint through frames and accompanying objects that draw on the lily, rosary, armour, fire and martyrdom. Moving between jewellery, costume and scenography, the works show how an object worn on the face can articulate identity, emotion and narrative without words.

Sára Pátová — Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic Sára Pátová combines silver and thread in intimate pendants that bring together the tactile sensibility of textile craft and the evocative potential of jewellery. Her work extends the language of embroidery into small, wearable forms, where delicate structures invite touch and closeness. Informed by her interest in scent and personal experience, these pieces become quiet carriers of sensation, memory and emotion.

Marion Blume — Diplom (Meisterschülerin), Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, Germany Held & Holding consists of a bismuth rod with a cord cast continuously through it — brittle enough to be broken by hand. To wear the piece as a necklace, the wearer must break it: an act that feels wrong, yet is essential. The gesture is irreversible; the object can never be returned to its original form, and that moment of decision is permanently bound to both the piece and the person who performs it. A cold, inert rod becomes something intimate only through destruction — the resulting necklace is the fragmented rod itself.

Nora Reitelshöfer — Diplom, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, Germany Straddling the boundaries between jewellery, sculpture, and object, Reitelshöfer’s work explores physicality, identity, and societal attribution through materials that embody a familiar yet unstable state — silicone, porcelain, matches, latex. Removed from their original context and placed in new relation to the body, these materials give form to the fine line between control and its loss, between function and dissolution. Through repetition, condensation, and transformation, the pieces create a simultaneous sense of closeness and unease, opening a space for contemplative engagement with identity and social meaning.

Florian Anderer — BA, Hochschule Pforzheim — Jewellery and Everyday Object Design (SOdA), Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences, Germany The work of Florian Anderer, Sampling – A Little Different, Florian Anderer celebrates creation as a collective process. He samples and reworks visual languages, materials and forms drawn from other artists, combining brass, copper, silver, stones and found elements into new constellations. The collection treats influence not as imitation, but as an ongoing exchange in which shared knowledge is continually transformed and passed on.

Julian Graeve — MA, Hochschule Pforzheim — Jewellery and Everyday Object Design (SOdA), Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences, Germany Julian Graeve’s Flamboyance celebrates adornment as a confident and expressive language of masculinity. Using floral forms in copper, silver and cotton, he creates a romantic transformation of masculine display, while traditional male accessories serve as points of reference. The collection opens up a more generous, joyful and nuanced way of expressing masculinities.

Isabelle Keller — MA, Hochschule Pforzheim — Jewellery and Everyday Object Design (SOdA), Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences, Germany In Light Matters, Isabelle Keller creates perceptual objects in stone, crystal and metal that make light tangible through its encounter with darkness. Evoking the physical and metaphorical space of a cave, these forms hold, frame or release small “light growths” within dense, dark structures. They function as objects but can also be worn as rings, bringing the experience of light into an intimate relationship with the body.

Olga Struck — MA, Hochschule Pforzheim — Jewellery and Everyday Object Design (SOdA), Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences, Germany Olga Struck’s In Pursuit of Clarity explores clarity as a fleeting condition, continually reshaped by light, movement and perception. Through grinding, matting and mirroring borosilicate glass, she creates rings that refract, transmit and reflect their surroundings. Each piece changes with the body and the light around it, making perception itself part of the work.

Lena Dörzbach — Metal Design & Jewellery, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim, Germany Lena Dörzbach develops body-related objects and jewellery through an intuitive process in which material, form and personal motivation are closely intertwined. Her work emerges from experimental material transformations, allowing familiar materials to acquire new physical and emotional associations on the body. Rather than treating jewellery as fixed adornment, she understands it as a sensitive medium for negotiating proximity, movement and individual experience.

Franz Kirsch — Metal Design & Jewellery, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim, Germany In the project „Sparks of joy“, a machine is being developed to release differently colored sparks. The project explores the fascination with machinery and pyrotechnics and recreates it through a mechanical device.

Pauline Judith Kortenhaus — Metal Design & Jewellery, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim, Germany Pauline Judith Kortenhaus’s Pearl Poem transforms a passage of text into a delicate body-related object made from Miyuki seed beads and thread. The work holds its words close to the body, but reveals them only when the necklace is removed—making intimacy conditional on an act of exposure. Between adornment and language, the piece gives private meaning a tactile, quietly performative form.

Tim Neumann — Metal Design & Jewellery, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim, Germany Funnel Activity explores transformation as an open process of material, spatial, and social negotiation. Rather than focusing on finished objects, the work approaches silversmithing as a practice of creating relationships, processes, and spatial constellations. An open pipe system reflects continuous cycles of receiving and releasing, connection and separation, growth and dissolution. Metal, clay, and textile act as active agents within an assemblage where craftsmanship and theoretical reflection generate new forms of thinking.

Emma Sattler — Metal Design & Jewellery, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim, Germany Emma Sattler’s Do You See It, Feel It? confronts the pressure of social beauty ideals through jewellery that is at once adornment and armour. Hammered, enamelled copper forms derived from folds of her own body are bound around the waist with the ribbons of ballet shoes, turning vulnerability into a visible, protective presence. Texts that emerge only when the necklace is removed deepen the work’s tension between concealment, exposure and self-perception.

Paul Schambach — Metal Design & Jewellery, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim, Germany A scared tree meets a patched stone. Both carry their own unique stories. “Der Narbentisch” brings them together and creates a new chapter in the objects’ lives.

Gerrit Schulze-Raestrup — Metal Design & Jewellery, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim, Germany Working across a variety of craft techniques, the artist transforms memories of his family’s farm into sculpture and performance. Blick in die Sterne (“A Glance at the Stars”) follows a person peeling apples and arranging the peels into constellations, while others play pétanque with forged steel apples in the shade of a tree built from self-fired bricks and birch branches. Forged apples, cast aluminium apple peels, stucco marble, silver, unfired clay bricks, and an inherited armchair extend this memory into standalone objects. Together, they negotiate care, resource use, and inheritance—asking where one comes from and where one is heading.

Xin Lan — MA, New Craft – Object Design, Peter Behrens School of Arts, Hochschule Düsseldorf – University of Applied Sciences, Düsseldorf, Germany Xin Lan’s Frozen Pearls reflects on Eiswein as a fragile cultural tradition increasingly threatened by climate change. Moving from branching silver forms to ordered clusters and skeletal structures, the jewellery traces a gradual disappearance: first the grapes, then the conditions that allow them to exist. Frosted surfaces in heat-whitened silver and polyamide suggest cold without depicting it directly, making environmental instability palpable through absence and transformation.

Laura Sophia Herrlich — BA, Gemstones and Jewellery at Idar Oberstein, Hochschule Trier — Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany Laura Sophia Herrlich uses ornament and pattern as a language for memory, emotion and connection. Her colourful brooches and rings translate personal experiences, cherished objects, places and impressions of gemstones into layered compositions of paper leather, vinyl, resin, lacquer and silver. These patterns carry private stories while leaving room for new associations to emerge through the wearer’s own memories.

Félicia Kocher — MFA, Gemstones and Jewellery at Idar Oberstein, Hochschule Trier — Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany Félicia Kocher creates jewellery that is unapologetically colourful, precise and meant to be worn beyond special occasions. Grounded in goldsmithing and expanded through experimentation with varied materials, her work brings craft discipline into playful, conspicuous forms. Rather than treating adornment as an exception, she invites it into everyday life as an act of confidence and pleasure.

Gülçe Kulaç — BA, Gemstones and Jewellery at Idar Oberstein, Hochschule Trier — Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany Gülçe Kulaç explores how food, tradition, memory and experience become part of who we are. Combining perishable remnants with enduring stone, she brings softness into dialogue with hardness, and the fleeting with the permanent. Subtle references to Turkish techniques and patterns anchor these works in questions of heritage, while jewellery becomes a vessel for the personal and collective traces we carry within us.

Kristina Neumann — MFA, Gemstones and Jewellery at Idar Oberstein, Hochschule Trier — Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany Kristina Neumann creates stone-carved necklaces that bring together the sensorial worlds of food, the body and domestic life. Drawing on the structural logic of architecture—support, balance, containment and load—her works move between abstraction and familiar forms, recalling flesh, vegetables, spices and utensils. These tactile arrangements consider jewellery as a mobile setting for care and exchange: objects that hold, carry and offer meaning in close proximity to the body.

Selen Özus — MFA, Gemstones and Jewellery at Idar Oberstein, Hochschule Trier — Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany In Play Time, Selen Özus turns the fragmented rhythms of motherhood into exuberant necklaces made from porcelain, plastic toys, plush fabric and heat-shrink tubing. Developed through play and domestic improvisation, the works reframe fragility as a form of resilience: porcelain cracks, toys flatten and wrap around it, and soft materials carry the distortions of care. Shaped by the shared life of mother and daughter, each necklace reflects the physical and emotional experience of carrying, adapting and creating within limited time.

Flóra Valéria Szöllősi-Cira — MFA, Gemstones and Jewellery at Idar Oberstein, Hochschule Trier — Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany Flóra Valéria Szöllősi-Cira’s work emerges from the experience of living between worlds: village and city, art and science, faith and doubt. Using materials that range from marble, stone and brass to paper, plastic foil and discarded study notes, she gives form to the uncertainty and possibility of this in-between state. Her jewellery and objects become personal markers of belonging without fixed borders.

Sophia E. L. Tartler — Meisterschülerin, Akademie der bildende Künste Nürnberg, Germany Sophia E. L. Tartler uses jewellery to shift what is hidden into view. In Zyklus, menstrual blood—still marked by stigma—is transformed into a knotted strand of pearl-like forms, confronting inherited ideas of purity, value and shame with the body’s generative reality. The necklace takes its meaning from contradiction: pearls conventionally signify permanence and refinement, while blood registers a living process of change, repetition and renewal. An inherited gold clasp from the artist’s grandmother anchors the work in family memory, creating a material link between intimate biography and cycles that extend beyond the individual. Zyklus makes adornment a place where vulnerability, lineage and embodied knowledge can be held together.

Daniela Kirschner — BA Product and Jewellery Design, Hochschule Wismar, Germany Daniela Kirschner explores how small, seemingly ordinary objects become charged with personal and social meaning. Her work considers value not as an inherent quality of material or function, but as something formed through memory, attachment and repeated everyday use. Focusing on trinkets as carriers of experience, Kirschner examines how objects accumulate stories and become entangled with identity. What may appear insignificant can hold a profound emotional presence: a private archive of relationships, habits and shared cultural codes. Her jewellery and objects make this quiet process visible, asking how the things we keep help us locate ourselves within the world.

Alice Kupri — BA Jewellery and Blacksmithing, Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) — Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, Tallinn, Estonia Alice Kupri’s Left to Be Forgotten holds on to the fragile interval after a party, when excitement has dissolved into stains, debris and partial recollection. She translates its familiar remnants—make-up, a champagne cork, melting ice, an ibuprofen blister pack, keys and tangled headphones—into jewellery and life-sized objects made from silver, enamel, wax and carved stone. By giving disposable or overlooked things the material gravity of agate, quartz, alabaster and obsidian, Kupri unsettles the boundary between the precious and the mundane. Her work turns an ephemeral social scene into a small archaeology of the present: a collection of objects that preserves not the event itself, but its unstable afterimage.

Terje Meisterson — MA Jewellery and Blacksmithing, Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) — Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, Tallinn, Estonia Terje Meisterson begins with a sheet of paper and asks whether a true new beginning is possible. Through layering, compression, cutting and carbonisation, paper becomes a record of irreversible change: altered, but never emptied of what it has been. Her jewellery treats transformation as a form of memory. In Carta Pura and Carbon, the material’s former state remains present but less legible, suggesting that beginning again may not mean leaving the past behind, but learning to read it differently.

Kimia Parang — MA Design-Contemporary Jewellery, École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design (ENSAD), Limoges, France Kimia Parang considers jewellery a portable geography, shaped by the body, memory and movement. Drawing on Persian miniature painting, she transforms the postcard into a wearable encounter with place. Jade from Idar-Oberstein, Afghan lapis lazuli and Limoges porcelain bring distant landscapes into intimate proximity. Worn on the body, these compositions travel between places and people, moving through time as heirlooms and through generations as heritage.

Juliette Becq — MA, Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR), Strasbourg, France Juliette Becq approaches jewellery as a sculptural presence shaped by body, garment and space. Working with silver, nickel silver and steel, she uses lamination, tension, reflection and magnetic force to make fastening, folding and suspension visible. Her works move between jewellery, sculpture and display, revealing quiet exchanges between material, gesture and gaze.

Anna Osmolovsky — Jewelry and Fashion, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel Anna Osmolovsky’s Under the Skin reflects on her personal growth and relationship with home and family. Raised to value achievement over emotion, she learned to see doubt as danger and weakness as shame. Brooches shift from bandage to butterfly, while rings move from fingernail to striking snake, evoking the pain and liberation of becoming herself.

Daria Parnos — BFA Jewelry and Fashion, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel With Deconstruction and/or Reconstruction, Daria Parnos turns furniture from broken homes into wearable fragments. Based on objects from her own home, silver miniatures are dismantled and reassembled as jewellery. Gathered in a jewellery box or worn as trinkets, they preserve memories of a home once lost—and one that may belong again.

Tamar Porges — BFA Jewelry and Fashion, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel Tamar Porges’s A Constant Longing considers home as something continually built and dismantled. White, wall-like layers suggest shelter but expose cracks, repairs and traces of touch. Necklaces and brooches make the body a home and the skin a wall, carrying fragments of memory and a home that remains.

Noam Sasson — Jewelry and Fashion, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel In What Makes Darya Happy, Noam Sasson follows two months of Darya’s everyday excitements, making a wax ring for each one. Shared attention to small moments becomes a record of friendship, innocence and renewed wonder. The final cast ring recalls childhood friendship symbols: two initials on an arrow pinned to a heart.

Gal Voller — Jewelry Design, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Ramat Gan, Israel Gal Voller’s The Main Support transforms discarded 3D-printing supports into the foundation of jewellery. Enlarged, repeated and reconfigured in flexible TPU, these technical forms become bracelets, rings and earrings with silver and zirconia settings. By exposing hidden mechanics, Voller blurs tool and ornament, necessity and aesthetic value.

Masateru Kato — Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry, Tokyo, Japan Masateru Kato’s Invisible brings hidden structure to the surface. Stones set on the reverse of the brooches and earrings appear only through reflection, inviting the viewer to look closer. The work draws on the desire to discover what is concealed, using simple, refined forms to reveal the unseen.

Atsuya Kubo — Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry, Tokyo, Japan Atsuya Kubo’s Eruption and Solidification gives physical form to emotions that resist containment. Using thermally fused crayons on nickel silver and brass, Atsuyo creates coagulated, dripping fields of colour that seem still warm—raw traces of energy caught between explosion and stillness.

Ryoichi Kurotaki — Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry, Tokyo, Japan Ryoichi Kurotaki’s Intersection explores how individual vulnerability can become collective strength. Overlapping lines form a resilient structure, while the subtle expansions at their meeting points hold gemstones as traces of human relationships. The brooch makes visible the value generated through connection with others.

Ye-jin Kang — MFA, Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea For Ye-jin Kang, the forms of plants express an order shaped through growth—a language of their own. By folding and bending paper, Kang traces how plants gradually shape themselves through cycles of contraction and expansion. These explorations are translated into metal, where simplification reveals the underlying structure and order of growth. The work presents plants as quiet, enduring presences shaped by the persistent order of nature.

Soo-young Kim — MFA, Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea In Wandering Maze, Soo-young Kim approaches the unknown as a maze: not a place of loss, but a playful field of exploration and possibility. Inspired by Monument Valley, the works translate complex routes into minimal geometric forms and soft pastel colour. Their intersecting lines evoke life’s crossroads, transforming uncertainty into pleasure and creative freedom.

So-jeong Lee — MFA, Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea Since childhood, So-jeong Lee has been fascinated by ornamental fish, especially the graceful way they move and spread their fins. Lee transforms these aquatic forms into wearable objects using Korean lacquer, eggshell and mother-of-pearl to express their vibrant colours, shimmering scales and intricate patterns. Through touch, movement and close interaction, the brooches invite an intimate appreciation of the quiet elegance and vitality of aquatic life.

YongJung Cho — BFA, Dankook University, Cheonan, Korea Traces of Sorrow explores how sorrow accumulates within us, becoming both physical and psychological traces. By comparing these marks to various objects and phenomena, the work transforms them into images of scars. Although these marks may never fully heal, they stand as evidence that we continue to live with our sorrow.

Soojin Go — BFA, Dankook University, Cheonan, Korea Soojin Go’s work explores how unexpressed emotions and internal wounds can be visualized through the form of brooches. By comparing these psychological and physical traces to various objects, the work transforms them into images of scars. These marks, though they may never fully heal, serve as evidence of the person’s ongoing life with sorrow. Ultimately, these pieces act as landscapes condensed with the remnants of memory and the layers of time left within the inner self.

Tianze Yao — BFA, Dankook University, Cheonan, Korea Living towards death explores the relationship between artificial constructs and nature, investigating how order is generated and transformed between these two domains. Multiple individual rings, each formed into a floral motif, symbolize the vitality of natural life. Gathered within a structural frame, these rings assemble into a brooch, integrating individual forms into a unified structural order. This work proposes that order is never fixed.

Yewon Goo — BA Metal Art & Design, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea Flux reconsiders discarded printed banners as materials with renewed value. Cut and layered until their original messages dissolve into fragments of colour and texture, they are combined with driftwood retained close to its natural form. The jewellery brings together industrial waste and wood shaped by water, holding contrasting timescales in a single wearable object. Sustainability becomes a tactile experience, felt directly on the body rather than simply declared.

Youjin Jo — BFA Metal Art & Design, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea Re-Folded reinterprets her childhood memory of origami through the medium of metal. Thin copper sheets are annealed and repeatedly folded into zigzag structures, transforming a flat surface into three-dimensional forms. Coloured resin adds vividness and strengthens the delicate metal, while the overlapping planes evoke flowers in bloom. The series explores the pleasure of making through repetition, transformation and material experimentation.

Yoonsoo Park — BFA Metal Art & Design, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea Red Bush Clover Necklace and Black Bush Clover II Necklace reinterpret Hwatu, a traditional Korean card game associated with everyday life and collective memory. Familiar motifs such as willow branches, red bush clover and black bush clover are cut, heated and recoloured, preserving recognisable traces while transforming the cards into sculptural jewellery. Flat images become wearable three-dimensional forms, allowing Hwatu to move beyond its original function and acquire new meaning. The series explores how cultural imagery can be transformed through material and making while remaining connected to its origins.

Deimantė Kiesutė — MA Applied Arts, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Telšiai Faculty, Lithuania Coverings explores personal strategies of seeking safety and protection through the image of a shell. Real or imagined, the shell becomes a layer that conceals discomfort, tension and vulnerability while creating security around the body and mind. The agate collars resemble shells grown from within, functioning like garments or second skins. Their material presence questions whether protection is genuinely effective or has become an unconscious, habitual gesture.

Julia Pawińska — BA, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem, Netherlands CHMARA is a collection of brooches inspired by insects, built from collaged photographs of caterpillars, butterflies, beetles, and spiders. Through beautiful, close-up detail, the work sets out to counter the common fear of these creatures. Two brooches use lenticular lenses to distort the image beneath, giving it movement and heightening the sense of wearing a living insect. The series takes its title from the Polish word for “swarm.”

Niloofar Salehi — BA, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, Netherlands Rooted in the belief that when words fall short, the body speaks, Salehi’s work explores the embodiment of nonverbal communication. Her wearable objects in brass, wood, and textile invite visitors into a shared, participatory space — entered with a bow through a deliberately lowered threshold. Three roles unfold: one wears a metal headpiece, another activates it with sound-making tools, and a third bears witness. Through this collective ritual, the work reveals what language cannot hold but the body can always feel.

Taran Helene Graff — MFA, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Oslo, Norway Bodily Sensations – A Materialisation of Embodied Experiences and Emotional Imprints Fascinated by the cycles of the body and nature, Graff’s work explores how internal bodily experiences and emotional imprints can be materialised through art jewellery, sculpture, and installation. Organic shapes evoke inner bodily landscapes, while contrasts between strength and fragility, protection and openness are explored through material. The physical force of metalworking becomes a means of processing emotion — hammer marks left as traces of lived experience — while stone introduces geological time and change. Forged and enamelled copper, silver, and stones gathered across Norway give form to the rhythms of breath, pulse, and the menstrual cycle, connecting the female body to the larger rhythms of nature.

Sarah Vassø — BFA, Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), Oslo, Norway As an integrated deaf artist, Vassø has spent much of her life navigating a hearing world from a position between participation and distance. The noses in her work emerge from a lifelong archive of observation — not portraits of specific individuals, but fragments remembered from countless social encounters where conversation was strained or inaccessible. Cast in bronze, these forms are transformed from fleeting observations into enduring presences, simultaneously intimate and incomplete. The work gives form to a way of seeing shaped by a life lived between access and absence.

Jada Morris — Bachelor of Visual Art, Dunedin School of Art, Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand Shaped by a lifetime spent along the coastlines of Aotearoa through surfing, Morris’s work explores the intersections of body and land through a female gaze. Shells gathered from significant coastal places are held within fluid, repousséd metal forms that engulf and conceal them — offering protection both of the shells and of the lived experiences they have come to represent. Threaded with muka, the natural inner fibre of the harakeke plant, the pieces speak to depths of letting go, moving through, and acceptance. Each work carries the existing bias and connotations between woman and earth, held close to the body as something both precious and quietly endured.

Aurora Smyth — Bachelor of Visual Art, Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand Droplets From Home Aurora Smyth’s organic hand-blown glass vessels contain water collected from the Waianakarua river, a site deeply connected to her life and background in Aotearoa, creating strong bonds between memory, identity, and lived experience. Activated by light, the pieces produce shifting refractions that evolve with movement and time, inviting the viewer to consider value as both a personal and culturally constructed phenomenon. Over time, some vessels leak, transforming the act of wearing into a conscious gesture — water absorbed into the skin before eventually returning to the land, leaving invisible traces of the wearer’s journey.

Marta Farinha — Individual Project in Jewellery, Ar.Co – Centro de Arte, Lisbon, Portugal Drawn to trinkets, vintage objects, and the charged intimacy of things kept and forgotten, Farinha begins her practice with chance encounters — objects that provoke, amuse, or stir something quietly sentimental. Childhood is a persistent site in her work: the imaginary friend who never quite existed becomes a physical creature, stitched and sculpted from the skins of dismembered plush toys. By “skinning” these familiar forms and reconfiguring their remains into jewellery, Farinha questions how memory and emotion cling to material things. Playful in surface yet quietly unsettling beneath, her work inhabits the uneasy border between what is cherished and what is strange.

Isabella Perillo — Advanced Project in Jewellery, Ar.Co – Centro de Arte, Lisbon, Portugal Rooted in the Brazilian cerrado and now working in Lisbon, Perillo turns to the ordinary, to childhood memories, and to the inner life as the ground of her practice. Her work moves across questions of identity, human duality, and spiritual development — probing the weight of freedom, the fragility of the human condition, and the desires that drive and divide us. Materials are chosen for their resistance or their lightness, their ancestral quality or their disposability, always in service of meaning. Intuitive and process-led, her jewellery asks what traces we leave, what we carry, and at what cost we choose to be free.

Maria Bencivenni — MFA, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Rooted in drawing and doodling as fluid, non-linear processes, Bencivenni uses making as a meditative tool for self-analysis and the transformation of inner experience. Gesture, thought, and matter intertwine in a continuous becoming, where intuitive marks reveal hidden narratives and translate inner chaos into signs, rhythms, and structures. The jewel emerges from this process as an extension of the body — a psychological space, a carrier of memory and personal meaning. Craft, for Bencivenni, is above all a practice of care and self-listening.

Olivia Plummer — BFA, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Drawing on the “IKEA Effect” — the theory that people value objects more when they contribute to their creation — Plummer’s work examines how participation in making can reshape perceptions of value, whilst blurring the boundaries between designer, maker, and wearer. Her project takes the form of a functional jewellery kit that the recipient can assemble as a ring, wear as a brooch or pendant, or reconfigure across its component parts. Play, participation, and material experimentation are at the core of her practice, which draws inspiration from architecture, design, and everyday objects. Made to be made, but also made to be worn.

Marta Bosch Valentí — Higher Vocational Diploma in Artistic Jewellery, Escola Massana, Art and Design Centre, Barcelona, Spain Rooted in a relationship with her grandmother and mother, Marta Valentí’s work gives form to an invisible thread connecting three generations — now held in vessels of memory, almost amulets. The vase-shaped pieces speak through a non-verbal language of light, iridescence, texture, and colour, balancing calm with strength through the millennia-old technique of Urushi lacquer. Contemporary materials — 3D-printed biodegradable filament, ecological resins, mother-of-pearl — meet ancestral craft in pieces that are honest in both process and form. Jewellery, for Marta Bosch Valentí, is an intimate space where memory and material converge.

Marina Cabrera Sabata — Enamels Residency, Escola Massana, Art and Design Centre, Barcelona, Spain Textiles, colour, and a deeply personal iconography come together in Cabrera Sabata’s kitsch altars and reliquaries, which centre femininity and queerness as sites of collective and personal struggle. Her work exposes the heart openly — turning body, blood, grief, and desire into wearable declarations that resist the patriarchal gaze. Stitching, embroidery, and enamelling are wielded as acts of alignment and self-recognition. The heart is exposed, and the truth becomes a second skin.

Javier Ens — Higher Vocational Diploma in Artistic Jewellery, Escola Massana, Art and Design Centre, Barcelona, Spain Through the simultaneous casting of silver and copper, Ens develops a bimetal in which both materials remain visible and retain their individual identities, producing unrepeatable surfaces where control and chance are in constant dialogue. Compact volumes meet open structures, establishing tensions between the organic and the constructed, order and chaos. The work reflects on coexistence — on the possibility of forming a unified whole without erasing difference. Trained in sculpture and artistic blacksmithing, Ens positions his practice at the intersection of jewellery, sculpture, and installation.

Anna Olivella Casas — Higher Technician in Applied Arts and Design (Artistic Jewellery), Escola Massana, Art and Design Centre, Barcelona, Spain Working through a laboratory-like process of trial and error, Olivella Casas is drawn to the moments when glass becomes unrecognisable — porous, foamed, eroded, vitrified — closer to a fossil or a fragment than to glass itself. Drawing loosely on archaeology, her pieces read less as finished objects than as evidence of a process: records not of what the material was, but of what it went through to arrive at what it is now. The question that drives the work is persistent — what happens to matter when it stops being identifiable and becomes a trace, a vestige of something that once existed?

Winona Dodds-Smith — BA Jewellery Design, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK Winona Dodds-Smith makes objects that are hard to place — somewhere between something you wear, something you hold, and something you keep on a shelf. Frustrated by the dullness of mass-produced things, she looked to historical objects — powder flasks, toilet boxes, baby rattles — for their mechanisms and their strangeness, and reinterpreted them into thirteen vessels made from brass, silver, wood, plastics, and petrified wood. The mix of materials gives each piece the feeling of something old and found, whilst remaining clearly contemporary. The work is a quiet argument for paying more attention to the objects around us.

Mathilda Monteil — BA Jewellery Design, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK Shaped by a life of constant movement, Monteil’s collection treats jewellery as portable identity — intimate objects kept close, carrying traces of place, memory, and belonging. Using stone carving, Japanese metal inlay, and lacquering techniques, she embeds process and personal history directly into the material. Masks and demon motifs recur as quiet guardians, protective talismans for the journey. Forms and motifs reappear and evolve across the pieces, building connections through shared design elements and holding, together, a fragment of a shifting narrative.

Alma Schäff — BA Jewellery Design, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK After twenty-two years in the same house, Schäff returned to find it a shell — a fragment of something that used to be. Her collection responds to that loss by investigating nothingness and how absence can itself become a presence. Hollow forms woven and bound from flattened copper and silver wire — a technique rooted in time spent learning bamboo crafting in Japan — are simultaneously empty and full, fragile and precious. Geometric shapes lifted from what was left behind: a mark on a wall, the memory of a jacket worn repeatedly. Each piece makes emptiness tangible, giving absence a form that can be worn and kept close.

Grace Wilson — BA Jewellery Design (First Class Honours), Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK Questioning what makes stone valued or overlooked, Wilson brings waste Portland stone and marble offcuts from the construction industry into dialogue with jade through hand carving — a labour that is argumentative rather than incidental, unsettling assumptions about worth before a single piece is worn. Some pieces arrive at a definitive form; others resist it, holding incompleteness not as failure but as refusal. Whether each piece is jewellery or object is left deliberately open, inviting those who encounter the work to reflect on what makes something worth calling precious.

Shiyao Wang — BA Jewellery & Silversmithing, Edinburgh College of Art, UK Wang’s work grows out of a familiar pressure — the weight of expectations from family, education, and society, and the effort of finding your own voice within that noise. Her pieces follow a journey from feeling restricted by those outside voices to gradually forming something of her own. Materials shift as that journey unfolds: fragile paper becomes silver as she grows more certain. The work doesn’t end in rebellion but in something more honest — learning to listen, and finding a balance between what others expect and what you think for yourself.

Hannah Redpath — BA Silversmithing & Jewellery Design (First Class), Glasgow School of Art, UK Caught between stillness and shift, Redpath’s pieces takes the visual language of paper as its starting point. Each piece is crumpled, imprinted, or torn in silver and copper to embody the texture and fragility of paper — held as if frozen mid-motion, a pause within continuous movement. An all-white palette strips back colour to focus attention on light, shadow, and the dimension that emerges from each warped and manipulated surface. She balances structure with lightness, transience with permanence — making something solid that looks as though it might give way.

Lani Ward — BA Silversmithing & Jewellery Design, Glasgow School of Art, UK For Ward, escape has always come in two forms: the absorbing silence of reading and the focused intensity of making. Her collection translates both into jewellery, with each piece acting as proof of an imagined world — the accumulated influence of a lifetime of reading, given physical form. Drawing on a single source, Mary E. Pearson’s novel Dance of Thieves, specific moments from the narrative are rendered as wearable objects through texture, sound, and detail. Fine wire sewn into metal brought textile processes into the work, a technique that became its own form of escape — the same absorbed concentration, Ward notes, that only a good book understands.

Sig Bernhoft — MA, Royal College of Art, London, UK Drawn to crystals and their inclusions, Bernhoft’s graduate collection plays with the conceit of controlling mineralisation — inventing inclusions that could not exist in the natural world. By combining materials that do not belong together, or colours that would never occur within a crystal, the work carries an irony of its own. Each carved quartz piece presents itself as specimen and fiction simultaneously.

Seren Cheng — MA, Royal College of Art, London, UK Inspired by Alan Watts’ notion that the mind’s belief in its ability to control the natural self is an illusion, Cheng’s work draws a parallel between the desire to control the body and the misreading of material properties. Wood, easy to process, stands for an idealised productivity; stone, slow and resistant, mirrors the body’s own pace and logic. Like stone, the body demands patience, yet under a performance-driven society it is treated as if it were wood. The project proposes working with materials — wood, stone, and metal — as a means of reflecting on ourselves through our encounters with the physical world.

Yimeng Liu — MA, Royal College of Art, London Rooted in the Mother Earth metaphor and the traditions of ethnic wedding adornments, Herritory examines why women and land are displayed, owned, and used as resources. Skin, hair, and bodily folds are translated into geological forms through casting, electroforming, and hand-carved agate, navigating the tension between concealment and revelation. Through the physical language of body, weight, and surface, the work reflects on bodily agency, objectification, and visibility across cultures and time.

Yuze Pan — MA Jewellery & Metal, Royal College of Art, London, UK Polyphony explores how different voices, identities and perspectives can coexist within a shared structure without being reduced to a single interpretation. Inspired by musical polyphony, the work uses repeated aluminium units, colour, structure and movement to create distinct yet connected voices. As the viewer moves around the work, colours appear, recede and overlap, meaning that no single viewpoint reveals the entire composition. Through its relationship with jewellery, the body and movement, Polyphony presents coexistence as a dynamic condition in which individuality remains visible while different voices share the same space.

Colin Smith — MA Jewellery & Metal, Royal College of Art, London, UK Houses of the Holy transforms abandoned automotive panels into a bodily and almost sacred presence. His fascination with UV-damaged objects, decay and visible provenance led him to regard chipped paint and pitted metal as scars. Car grilles and lenses suggest mouths and eyes, encouraging projections of flesh, desire and spirituality. Sacred figures placed within the vehicle’s lenses allow the condemned body to look back.

Cindy (Xinyi) Wu — MA Jewellery & Metal, Royal College of Art, London, UK *Almost Under Control *centres on the uneasy, familiar moment when an ordinary action does not go as intended. Wu translates her own discomfort with losing control into jewellery and objects that invite physical participation. A Jenga-like tower conceals wearable pieces, making each choice and removal threaten the balance of the whole. A pull tab stretches but cannot open its can, while a cabochon forced into an undersized bezel breaks through the silver setting. Tension, failure and frustration are allowed to tip into quiet surreal humour.

Xiangzhi Zhao (George) — MA graduate, Royal College of Art, London, UK Dice examines the material behaviour of transparent enamel, copper foil and silver. Through careful control of kiln temperature and firing time, copper migrates to the enamel surface, creating green, oxidation-like variations. The familiar visual language of dice is reduced to a systematic arrangement of points, stripping away representational imagery and meaning. Attention is thereby directed towards the objects’ fundamental qualities of scale, shape, surface and structure.

Ryan Seng — MFA Metalsmithing, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, USA Mementos, 2023–2026, reflects the accumulation of personal experiences and the emotional residue carried by clothing and objects. Jewellery becomes a means of communicating identity, desires and values through materials that evoke intimacy and sensuality. Unexpected combinations of horsehair, goat hair, rubber, obsidian, ebony, porcelain, ribbons and braids create tension while inviting touch. Everyday utilitarian forms are transformed into ritualistic objects that hold memories close to the body.

Sookyung Augustin — MFA Metalsmithing + Jewelry Design, Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Indiana University Bloomington, USA (In)Visible Identity: All the Little Things gives form to the invisible conditions shaping a fractured sense of self. Wool and copper, materials historically connected to the human body, evoke both care and discomfort: each is a personal contact allergen for the artist. Their labour-intensive processes—felting and blocking fibre, work-hardening and annealing metal—mirror a continual balancing of bodily tension. Through meticulous, repetitive making, the wearable works trace the accumulation of small physical and emotional discomforts while seeking to reconnect mind and matter.

Yishan Liu — BFA Jewelry + Metalsmithing, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA Yishan Liu’s jewellery explores how bodily balance can be restored when a person feels disconnected from the wider universe. Drawing on Chinese healing traditions such as cupping, acupuncture and Daoist meditation, the works use pressure, touch and tactile interaction to support moments of emotional instability. Non-puncturing points and blunt needle-like forms create subtle sensations on the skin, while organic protrusions and granular surfaces suggest the movement of Qi through an internal bodily universe.

Alees (Zeyu) Yang — MFA Jewelry + Metalsmithing, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA Memory persists not as a complete record, but through fragments, sensations and traces carried by the body. Drawing on family, migration, loss and her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s disease, Yang considers forgetting not as absence, but as a condition through which memories continue to surface. Fabric, fragmented photographs and fraying materials suggest the incomplete and emotional reconstruction of the past. As the jewellery changes through making and wearing, disappearance becomes part of the work, just as forgetting becomes part of memory.

Jonathon Zalakos — MFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA Zalakos’s jewellery traps spontaneous gestures within rigorously logical structures. Fist-squeezed plasticine flowers and incidental arrangements of gemstones are preserved through meticulous adaptations of traditional metalworking. Fingerprints, toolmarks and visible decisions retain traces of a spectral maker, suggesting child-like creation, improvised repair or overly formalised craftsmanship. These conflicting impressions place the viewer in an imagined context, prompting reflection on whether the work affirms identity or alienates humanity.

Maryam Kashani — MFA in Art, Jewelry and Metalwork, School of Art and Design, San Diego State University, USA *Jungle of Lions *examines how technology reshapes contemporary life, drawing on Kashani’s experience of religious dictatorship and surveillance. Partially transparent pendants take the form of simplified, faceless masks resembling fencing masks. Hung together like a crowd, their subtle differences in form, texture and size suggest a future society in which individuality is diminished. The work reflects on how technology transforms society, creating a culture in which people increasingly admire and reject the same things.

Winchi De Jesus — MFA Metal, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, USA Kapwa, meaning “self in other,” is a Filipino concept centred on togetherness. De Jesus translates this idea into intimate, wearable objects that process momentary experiences and are often dedicated to a person or something meaningful. Offcut wood, drawings and symbols carry recent recollections, turning humble materials into personal stories. Through these reflective objects, memories and connections accumulate, with Kapwa remaining at the core.

Marin Neuhard — MFA Metal, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, USA Neuhard examines objects left behind by commercialism, including packaging, receipts, price tags, signage and coupons. Once discarded and functionless, these fragments become evidence of impersonal ownership and the residuals of retail. Through beading, weaving and metalsmithing, they are transformed into crafted objects that visualise rotting, accumulation, deflation and crumpling. The uncanny forms and biting humour expose the uncomfortable realities of consumerism and overconsumption.