Loops and Stones

Weaving wire into structural, wearable necklaces.

Four of the necklaces I made!

Most of my posts tend to revolve around furniture and lighting, but I’ve always been drawn to interdisciplinary design. A big part of my personality, some blame it on being an Aries, is my love of starting new projects and, often, not finishing them. True to form, a couple of weeks ago I got inspired and started making necklaces (still debating whether I’ll sell them). So I’m using this post to share my latest creation.

This project began with an itch to work more sculpturally. Lately I’ve been especially drawn to the language of weaving. The sculptor Ruth Asawa has always been a huge inspiration of mine. Her hanging looped-wire pieces, often described as “drawings in space,” embody both delicacy and strength, transforming industrial wire into forms that feel organic and fluid. Asawa pioneered a way of seeing material not just as a medium, but as a collaborator in form-making.

Ruth Asawa amid her works in 1954.

Another, more personal influence is knitting. I picked up the craft during COVID, and its repetition and pattern-making often made me wonder how a technique meant for soft material might translate into something more structurally sound. I imagined moving from sweaters and hats to woven elements for lights or chairs.

Recently in New York, I wandered into Tiffany’s. I’ve never really seen myself as a “Tiffany’s person,” but I paused over Elsa Peretti’s iconic designs. I’ve always loved Peretti, especially after watching Halston in 2021, the Netflix biopic that beautifully captured her collaboration with Halston. Her jewelry, organic, elemental and wearable, reminded me that jewelry, like furniture or lighting, can live at the crossroads of art and design. I was especially drawn to Peretti’s Bean necklaces suspended in silk nets and used the form as inspiration for my own.

Left to right: Elsa Peretti at work; Peretti's Tiffany's pearl, gold and silk necklace (now in the British Museum); Liza Minnelli wearing Peretti's Tiffany's Bone Cuff

So when I started the necklaces, I thought of Peretti’s sculptural jewelry, focused on Asawa’s forms and carried over the motions I knew from knitting, bending, looping, weaving, into wire. The cages I’ve been forming to hold stones borrow from knitting’s logic: loops building on loops, structures born from tension and release.

For this series, I’ve been walking beaches out east, collecting stones. Each one becomes the centerpiece of a wire cage. I bend and weave the wire around the stone, then finish the piece with tassels and leather cords. They’re messy and irregular, each one shaped by the quirks of the stone and the tension of the wire. Every necklace feels somewhere between a talisman and a design study.

A bit of my wire wrapping process.

My necklaces are shaped by Asawa’s looping forms, by knitting needles, by 70s icons, and by the stones I happen to find by the ocean.

More pictures!