We are kicking off the new year with an exciting series where we highlight valued members of our community, share a glimpse of their lives, work and inspirations, and find out their connection with jewellery.

Beginning with Flavie Audi, an artist and designer who explores speculative geologies and imagined post-human topographies. We talked to Flavie at her Chelsea studio to discover what it means for her to 'own the moment'.

Audi’s practice centres around the manipulation of glass. This medium plays a crucial part, for the artist, in contemplating a utopian future world where humans create cosmic fragments and new types of landscape formations. Using the physical properties of glass, Flavie highlights the duality between the physical and virtual worlds. 

The surprising moment of discovering what is coming out of the kiln or a cast. Whether it is a happy or unhappy accident, opening the kiln or de-moulding is a moment of exciting discovery. The outcome is never guaranteed.

It is this element of surprise and uniqueness that I enjoy, being immersed in newness. It is, for me, an exercise not only of patience but of trusting life and embracing fully its uncertainties. By setting up a system that activates surprising moments, I am able let go of the control. The hazards of these moments guide me to change direction and evolve my ideas.

These moments happen in workshops surrounded by plenty of materials, machines and tools under extremely bright neon lighting.

The sound of these moments is always different and also out of my control. It is the sound of machinery, the noise of light-hearted voices overlayed with the cheesy music of random FM radio stations playing through bad quality speakers. 

These surprising moments create a dynamic shift in the artistic flow. They especially test my ability to manage my emotions. They push me to try again and again and trust the process.  

My passion and curiosity for glass has started while I was studying at the Architectural Association in London. It grew from my frustration towards the generic and boring use of glass that dresses modern and contemporary buildings and from my desire to reveal the sensuality and humanity within architecture.

It was during my final diploma project in 2011 that I manipulated glass for the first time: prototypes for a facade with undulating glass panels. Something came alive inside me: I discovered the material that would allow me to develop an artistic language.

I pushed my curiosity for glass further and completed a masters in the department of Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2014. I loved this department as it is very similar to the Bauhaus style of education where you learn from the material. I have an intimate and symbiotic relationship with glass. I learned to be fluid like glass, and glass learned to embrace my desired shapes and colours. I trust the viscosity of glass and I let the material have a certain authority in the process.

The material flows naturally and is warped by the force of gravity. There is also a connection with the city of Saida, located in the south of Lebanon, the birthplace of my grandfather and strangely also the cradle of glass blowing. This proximity of roots touches me a lot.   

It is my love for the making process that inspires and guides me. My grandmother told me, “One must dance life without forgetting that humour saves everything.” I like this metaphor to describe what I do, like a playful dance with materials. I strive to be in tune with materials and tools like a dance. This joy of material exploration is my refuge. The inspiration, the drive, the motivation, isn’t it all just a miracle of life?  

Glass is time. Listening to glass is listening to time. The change of viscosity of glass, gradually hardening or softening with heat, gives us a precise sense of the passage of time. To shape glass, bodily gestures must be fast and accurately coordinated with the temperature. Glass viscosity and colour act as a clock to guide the making process. We look at glass for the time not at the clock. It is about understanding how much glass can take before it will give up and break. Glass has the quality to freeze and capture the fleeting shape of that moment. It makes me see time as the potential for transformation and fluidity.

My attraction to jewellery lies in the way it pursues beauty and honours materials to their apex. It nurtures my curiosity towards the technicality and manipulation of materials. I am interested in the process of transforming the raw materials. I enjoy the alliance of emerging digital fabrication processes with the importance of preserving manual skills. The possibilities of combining craft and digital processes are endless, and this is exciting. The transformation of materials overlays legacies of craft, from ancestral to innovative techniques. 

Pieces of jewellery are objects of everlasting memory. They suggest permanence thanks to the imperishable and eternal properties of gold, silver, diamond and stones. Jewellery is gifted to you or passed on from generation to generation. Whether it is gifted to mark a special life moment or as a remembrance of past generations, jewellery is a token of memory. It reminds the wearer of an event, a promise, a rite of passage, a taste, a status.   

Jewellery sits at the intersection between memory and perfection. It is beauty on a very small scale. Working at this very small scale is a great challenge. The challenge of fitting to the body shape perfectly. Jewellery has a relationship with the human body but also with the inner self. It can evoke memories which are inaccessible to those around us. Wearing jewellery becomes an internal dialogue and fosters self-assurance and self-expression. At the same time it sends signals to those around us.

Jewellery is therefore a channel directed inwards and outwards, of memory, personality and perfection.   

It is when I discovered Fernando’s jewellery for the first time. It was a feature in a magazine of his first ever jewellery collection, entitled Fluid, right after his graduation over a decade ago.

I connected straight away with the fluid vocabulary of the pieces which echoed the fluidity that I express in my work. I contacted my Brazilian friend Fernanda and ask her if she knew this talented designer who creates all these pleasurable pieces. I wanted to meet him not only because we both transform enduring material into fluid shapes but also for our pursuit and appreciation of the beautiful.

Soon after we all met in London, and it was instantly a ‘Fluid’ connection! Since then, a nurturing communion of ideas grew strongly alongside a cherished friendship.