Necklaces, earrings, rings
Sterling silver, pearls, painted drift wood
“For Rodin, hands are “the essence of the body”.He sculpts them like we would of a face.
They have their own life.
We forget they belong to a body.
They tell about tenderness or sadness,
They tell about prayers or horrors.
With their ten fingers, they narrate life.”
I explore the intimate connection between the body as it appears and the feelings that live within it, using jewellery as a metaphor for the in‑between — the threshold where the physical self meets the inner life. Rather than a border, this space is a crossing point: a place where emotions, dreams and fears seep outward and subtly reshape who we are.
This work treats adornment not as decoration but as a language that makes inner states visible. The work embraces the body and, in a sense, turns it inside out: what is felt beneath the skin becomes part of the surface we present to others. Emotions are movements rather than fixed definitions, and the jewellery gives those movements form.
I begin with instinctive, sensorial pairings of disparate feelings and translate those juxtapositions into material decisions. The flow of gestures and the succession of movements — like those I experienced during a dance performance I saw: The Dreamers Ever Leave You (by Robert Binet) — inform the rhythm and arrangement of each piece. Each movement leads to the next; choices accumulate into a choreography of objects.
The performance left me in a haze of shifting dreams, bodies moving so close I could see each part independently. It echoed the fluidity in Auguste Rodin’s watercolour drawings of dancers, where motion is captured as something both fleeting and essential. That same sense of continuous movement informs how I build each work.
Each pearl represents a dream, a thought, a fear, a regret, a memory, a wish — the countless sensations that surround us and shape us. Their endless succession mirrors the long list of dreams we carry through life and the choices we make to pursue the ones that matter most.
Organic materials and soft hues convey emotions that are shapeless yet deeply embodied. We feel them physically: butterflies in the stomach, an aching heart, flushed cheeks. These sensations become part of the jewellery’s structure, giving weight and texture to the invisible.
Layered and assembled, these elements create a wearable archive where identity is remade through movement and feeling. The pieces embrace the body, holding close the dreams that hug us, the ones that wait their turn, the ones that press down urgently, and even the impossible ones we continue to dream anyway.
The work becomes a sanctuary for the inner life — a place where gestures, memories and dreams converge. Each piece is a quiet choreography, a fragment of movement suspended in time, inviting the body to carry its own stories with tenderness and intention.
Cloelea Jewellery 