September 14, 2023 |
BLINGIN’ IT IS TEN’S ONLINE SERIES WHERE WE SPOTLIGHT THE INNOVATORS AND CHANGE-MAKERS OF THE JEWELLERY WORLD.
Sustainable jewellery and ceramics brand Completedworks is all about being conscious. Working primarily with recycled or fairtrade materials, the London-based label uses sculptural craftsmanship to explore the social concerns that inform its work. Driven by a desire to create timeless, sturdy and consciously crafted pieces that are “classic, unfussy but with subversive elements”. Completedworks’ original metals are welded into shapes designed to transcend seasonal turnover. The business stands for much more than just beautiful accessories. At its core, it draws inspiration “from a better future”, and endeavours to ensure its work has as little impact on the environment as possible.
Founded by artistic director Anna Jewsbury – who comes from a maths and philosophy background in 2013, its core ethos has attracted a wide-ranging roster of exceptional women, including Adwoa Aboah, Jodie Comer, Emma Watson and Maya Rudolph. This impressive assemblage – which swells around artists, activists, poets and actors – shows the caliber of clientele Completedworks has garnered and, in turn, populated its community with. Starting off its retail journey by selling in spaces like Dover Street Market and Bergdorf Goodman, Jewsbury opened her own space in April 2023 – a shabby-chic appointments-only showroom that’s shell was previously inhabited by a local pub. The 2,500 square-foot space was created in collaboration with interior designer Hollie Bowden and sports a beige ceiling-to-floor palette with hard metalware populating the columns, door handles and staircase.
Coated in bright light from the meters-long skylight, the space is the perfect setting for Completedworks’ molded pieces that span across womenswear, menswear and homeware. Despite having a clear design language that showcases the brand’s aptitude for understated yet subversive basics, the range to be found at Completedworks caters to all. Pearl, resin, smoky quartz and vermeil can all be found peppered amongst the jewels, whilst glass, marble and clay are warped to create their odd yet painfully chic kitchen and bedroom trinkets. Throw a selective collection of bags, that would feel at ease on the arm of any cosmopolitan cool girl, into the mix and Completedworks’ stockroom is pretty chock-a-block.
For spring/summer 2024 the label is developing a jewellery, ceramics and handbag collection that bounces off the motif of a flower, symbolising “self-improvement and obsession with an unattainable state of perfection,” which is set to make its London Fashion Week debut this weekend, from 2:30 to 4:30 September 15. Expect the presentation to build on these themes, with elements of water reflection and video projection used in real time. Here, we chat with Jewsbury about what set Completedworks into motion, the designer’s respect for materials, her creative process and the SS24 collection.
ON THE BIRTH OF COMPLETEDWORKS
Jewsbury: “I was driven by this desire to create something new – something with a hint of social commentary – and jewellery became the perfect medium or platform for this. One thing the brand has always been about is creating enough space for ourselves to create and evolve without getting stuck in one genre and, in our minds at least, that starts with the name. We wanted a name that was slightly difficult to grasp, that was very general and difficult for people to pigeon-hole. But at the same time, there is something very specific about the name, for instance, it reminds us of a retrospective of an artist or a writer, one that looked at their complete body of work over a long period, say 20 or 30 years.”
ON ITS REDUCTIONIST AESTHETIC VOCABULARY
Jewsbury: “Reductionism is about extracting the simple from the complex whilst revealing a pattern, structure or common language. Similiarly, each collection will be a considered series of pieces with a common thread. The pieces themsleves are not unncessarily complicated. They’re precise, simplified and edited down to eliminate any distracting elements. It’s an approach and idea we keep in mind in everything we do without letting it overly dictate our process – you still need to have a certain freedom and sense of letting go when you’re creating something new.”
ON ITS UPCOMING SS24 LONDON FASHION WEEK PRESENTATION
Jewsbury: “For us, thinking about the presentation is always about wanting to make sure it has enough cultural value and contribution to make it worthwhile. It’s also an opportunity for us to work to push the ideas of traditional jewellery presentation and storytelling. For example for SS24, without wanting to reveal too much, we’re presenting our collection in a theatre using the presentation concept to build on some of the themes behind the collection.
“I think it all comes in through the process of developing a collection. We’re not designing the pieces in a vacuum – they reference the books we read, the art we see, the people we talk to. We look to find ideas by accident, in the hope that something will set off a stray thought or image. Sometimes we find ourselves mining our subjects from contemporary, everyday life, sometimes from broader historical or political ideas and we use these as a process to create a dialogue between the materials we use and an idea. There might not be any obvious traces of this process in the final piece but it could be there subtly. And it’s also important that the pieces are visually beautiful in their own right without needing to know or be burdened with the process that we went through to create them.”
ON THE VALUE OF RECYCLED MATERIALS
Jewsbury: “An awareness and respect for materials and the environment have been important to us from the beginning. It started with the reclaimed marble in our very first collection – we were putting marble in our products from quarries that had closed – and you have the realisation that this is the only piece you are going to get to work with. So we had a sense that we were working with finite resources from an early stage.
“My mother gave me a book of photographs by Sebastião Salgado that included images he took at the Serra Pelada metal mines in north-west Brazil in 1986. They are shocking and caused me to think about mining in a different way. I read one expert saying that to extract enough gold to produce a wedding band, 20 tonnes of waste is created. It just doesn’t make sense to us to use non-recycled sources if we can avoid it.”
ON HER CREATIVE PROCESS
Jewsbury: “What I love about all of our pieces is that our starting point is often a different material depending on what we are trying to achieve. Every material has a different density, different weight. So when it comes to a specific idea we want to explore it’s often about finding the material that offers you the right resistance to convey your idea. It might start with string, fabric, a found object, toothpaste or modelling clay. What I love about clay is that it can be very emotive as a medium. The clay moves with your hand movements – you can get a sort of dialogue.
“Making by hand allows the pieces to have this rawness and subtlety to them which is hard to replicate in other ways. I think it also allows you to have a dialogue with the material in some ways and it can almost suggest directions to you as you work with it. It is a slower way of working but so worthwhile.
“In terms of design I’m always thinking of someone who wants to express something through their choice of jewellery. I love that the wearer inevitably has a relationship with a piece – how it represents something for them, even if only just to say they made a choice to put that piece on today.
“I hope that people who love wearing our jewellery see something unexpected in our pieces that they can’t find anywhere else. We live in a world where things change very quickly, so there is something very reassuring about a visual language which has a nod to the classic in a modern context.”
ON ADDING OBJECTS TO HER REPERTOIRE
Jewsbury: “It started as a collaboration with a friend of the brand who was experimenting with ceramics at the time. The homeware became an opportunity to explore the same themes that we had been exploring with the jewellery, just experimenting on a slightly larger scale. We started out working mainly in ceramic but we’ve recently expanded into pieces made using 100 percent recycled glass and are excited to be working on a tableware collection for SS24. We’ve also in the process of launching a handbag line made using deadstock and recycled leather which has been really challenging in a good way.”
Photography courtesy of Completedworks.
