It is the story of a necklace that started life as a chest of drawers. Which is exactly the form of magical truth you experience when viewing the jewellery of Ana Khouri. The New York–based, Brazilian-born Khouri educated as a sculptor, and now she fuses sort and art in each of her items. She feels what she designs—in the literal feeling, the natural way, but in techniques outside of that, as well.
So how does an unused, unsigned rosewood chest relegated to a corner of a relatives farm exterior São Paulo become a one particular-of-a-sort collar set in honest-mined gold and centered with a pear-shaped, ethically created diamond? “The upper body provided the way into it,” states Khouri, whose time in her native place in the course of quarantine ignited a renewed link to character. It was the great colour of rosewood (“not far too pink, not as well yellow”), and, additional critical, it provided a source. Rosewood is a guarded product, unusual and revered and unavailable. Khouri, a collector of modernist Brazilian home furniture, understands its sensory potential. “I have sat on the same sofas and chairs all my lifestyle,” she claims. “But although I was absent I paid much more consideration to what it felt like when I ran my hand across the rosewood—how my pores and skin reacted to it. I required to share that. And I required this necklace to be bolder, just about like armor.” There is an air of warrior breastpiece about a bib necklace born of a chest of drawers, a trace of the mythological.
“Last calendar year,” Khouri says, “one may say I rediscovered my muse. As it frequently takes place, new ideas gave way to new strength, and with it an evolution in my strategy to jewelry.”
Evolution is never ever significantly from Khouri’s brain. When she launched herself as a jeweler in 2013, the perform was pure kind in metallic: strains and curves of gold. (The presentation of the pieces bundled guidelines in Khouri’s very own hand on how to don them.) She turned identified as the creator of classy ear cuffs, and also the wearer of them. Her function formulated from there, incorporating stones and a lot more self-confident styles. And then, in 2019, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a collar of white diamonds with two rare, suspended Brazilian Paraíba tourmalines sent the pronouncement: Khouri was a superior jeweler, a person with a solid model and an eye that searched for new components to fulfill the upcoming eyesight.
This time, fairly than diamond or tourmaline, the eye settled on rosewood. “It felt innovative,” Khouri says, “because it opened up a reexamination of my craft. From that one eyesight, I set my artistic energies to applying every thing I know about jewellery to fewer acquainted components. I turned absorbed in the interactions involving rosewood and metal and gems, as perfectly as their pressure. These new elements expected me to adapt some of my imaginative ambitions and make of it a thing essentially new.” And when that magic chest of drawers delivers its final piece of rosewood, Khouri will gracefully transfer on. “These pieces mirror this time. They are now. And the future items, they will be for an additional minute. One particular of their own.”
17 pieces from Ana Khouri’s new superior jewellery assortment are at the moment on see at Sotheby’s in New York, to accompany an exhibition of the Macklowe selection, whose extremely anticipated auction can take put November 15.
Ana Khouri wears a Gabriela Hearst costume in the leading image. Styled by MaryKate Boylan. Hair by Francis Catanese for R + Co. Haircare. Makeup by Brittany Whitfield for MAC Cosmetics.
This story appears in the December 2021/January 2022 difficulty of City & Region.
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