While I am so a jack of all trades - Jewellery is my first and foremost love. And being miss multi-mediums it's not just the precious metal creations that hold my heart but also (and probably more so) multi- material - artisan jewellery. Through Pinterest I stumbled on the creations of Maryam Keyhani.
Maryam Keyhani’s necklaces are self-titled works of art. No, literally: the Tehran-born, Toronto-raised designer was a painter first, brushing her feathered flights of fancy onto the canvas necks of imaginary women. Soon, like Pygmalion, she fell in love with her creations and wanted to give them life; to make them real.
Keyhani had no formal jewellery training, which means everything she learned to do, she learned to do her way, without rules or limitations. Besides, she has a world of lived-in dreams from which to draw. It was in Florence, where she spent a year as an art student, that she grew a deep love for hand-crafted, thoughtful luxury. In Berlin, she plucked the most gorgeously coloured feathers from a flea market. In Paris, she studied fashion illustration and saw, every day in Le Marais or along the canals, the sort of insouciantly elegant femmes she wanted to paint—and design for—always.
For her Fall 2011 collection, Keyhani restricted her Surrealist’s imagination to a few rarefied elements: plumage; leather sculpture; binding chains of gold. Thus the focus is on the designs, and the designs themselves are like no others. You can spot a Maryam K recognize a De Kooning or a Dali from across a long, white room.
