the greek vase collection.

Designing a jewellery collection with intention and purpose is a very long but very enjoyable process.

I always knew I wanted my first collection for Plato’s Fire to be based around Greek pottery. There’s something about the graceful lines, the elegant shapes, the familiarity of such objects thousands of years later, that I thought would lend themselves beautifully to jewellery.

So I began with an old, battered textbook, Woodford’s Introduction to Greek Art, and spent some cosy afternoons during that first lockdown flipping through it and marking out my favourite shapes and designs. I picked up some more books along the way - Carpenter’s Art & Myth in Ancient Greece and Boardman’s The History of Greek Vases were invaluable - and started narrowing my options down to five or six different vase styles which I thought might work.

Next: testing. I drew and cut out paper ‘prototypes’ (I use the word prototype very loosely here; this was by no means a scientific or even particularly well thought out process!) in the different vase styles I’d chosen. I held them up to my ears, taped them to necklace chains, increased/decreased the sizes, until I found something I liked.

I narrowed it down to four styles of vases - the amphora, oinochoe, lekythos, and kylix - and two sizes - large (for the two-colour statement earrings) and small (for everything else).

Next: turning my silly little paper scraps into vector drawings. Vectors are essentially just outline drawings in black, red, and blue, which tell the laser-cutter - the machine I use to cut out all the individual pieces of my jewellery - where to cut or engrave. At this stage, I realised that the kylix style just wasn’t going to work properly and dropped my chosen vase styles down to three.

Once I had my vectors, I hit up the amazing Abbie at Slice Laser Studio to laser-cut my initial samples for me. I tested, tweaked the designs, changed the acrylic colours I used, tested again, tweaked again, and finally landed with the thirteen pieces that make up the Greek Vases collection.