It is the tale of a necklace that commenced lifetime as a upper body of drawers. Which is particularly the variety of magical fact you come across when viewing the jewellery of Ana Khouri. The New York–based, Brazilian-born Khouri properly trained as a sculptor, and now she fuses form and art in each individual of her parts. She feels what she designs—in the literal feeling, naturally, but in means further than that, far too.
So how does an unused, unsigned rosewood upper body relegated to a corner of a household farm outdoors São Paulo grow to be a one-of-a-kind collar set in reasonable-mined gold and centered with a pear-formed, ethically produced diamond? “The chest presented the way into it,” says Khouri, whose time in her indigenous nation for the duration of quarantine ignited a renewed link to mother nature. It was the great shade of rosewood (“not as well purple, not also yellow”), and, additional essential, it available a useful resource. Rosewood is a secured substance, scarce and revered and unavailable. Khouri, a collector of modernist Brazilian home furniture, understands its sensory opportunity. “I have sat on the identical sofas and chairs all my everyday living,” she says. “But though I was absent I paid out a lot more interest to what it felt like when I ran my hand across the rosewood—how my pores and skin reacted to it. I wished to share that. And I needed 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 hint of the mythological.
“Last 12 months,” Khouri states, “one could say I rediscovered my muse. As it generally occurs, new suggestions gave way to new electrical power, and with it an evolution in my approach to jewellery.”
Evolution is never ever much from Khouri’s mind. When she launched herself as a jeweler in 2013, the work was pure kind in steel: lines and curves of gold. (The presentation of the parts provided instructions in Khouri’s own hand on how to have on them.) She turned known as the creator of elegant ear cuffs, and also the wearer of them. Her perform created from there, including stones and much more confident types. And then, in 2019, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a collar of white diamonds with two exceptional, suspended Brazilian Paraíba tourmalines shipped the pronouncement: Khouri was a higher jeweler, a single with a potent fashion and an eye that searched for new supplies to fulfill the up coming eyesight.
This time, relatively than diamond or tourmaline, the eye settled on rosewood. “It felt revolutionary,” Khouri suggests, “because it opened up a reexamination of my craft. From that a single eyesight, I established my artistic energies to implementing anything I know about jewellery to less acquainted products. I grew to become absorbed in the associations concerning rosewood and metallic and gems, as very well as their stress. These new materials necessary me to adapt some of my imaginative ambitions and make of it a thing essentially new.” And when that magic upper body of drawers provides its very last piece of rosewood, Khouri will gracefully transfer on. “These parts mirror this time. They are now. And the upcoming items, they will be for one more moment. A person of their individual.”
17 items from Ana Khouri’s new significant jewelry collection are currently on check out at Sotheby’s in New York, to accompany an exhibition of the Macklowe selection, whose extremely expected auction usually takes spot November 15.
Ana Khouri wears a Gabriela Hearst dress in the top image. Styled by MaryKate Boylan. Hair by Francis Catanese for R + Co. Haircare. Make-up by Brittany Whitfield for MAC Cosmetics.
This story appears in the December 2021/January 2022 problem of City & Country.
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