A gifted jewellery designer, in addition to an award-winning designer of tableware, leather-based items, residence items, presents and even designed packaging for Origins, Lisa Jenks is an icon. She can also be amongst a handful of ladies designers who got here on the jewellery scene within the late ‘80s, when a lot of the business was dominated by males. Lately she has refocused on what she loves essentially the most, which is creating lovely, flawlessly crafted silver jewellery.
“New York, my hometown, in addition to varied cultural traditions, artwork and structure are my inspiration,” she says. Her work is deeply influenced by Artwork Deco arts, midcentury fashionable design, the Vienna workshop motion, and something indigenous from Mexico to Polynesia.
Lisa says she “attracts a lot of her inspiration from a broad cultural panorama—making a multicultural, cross-referential collage that has change into a trademark of her work. There are connections to the towering angular types of Deco skyscrapers, the modernist components of the Bauhaus Faculty in addition to the rhythmic patterns of the indigenous arts from the South Pacific.”
Lisa has at all times designed in silver; she loves the way in which it seems to be and works. “I’m fueled by it,” she says. “It matches my aesthetic instincts and at all times seems to be fantastic. By utilizing the design language I’ve developed and weaving it into silver jewellery, I get to create one thing I’d like to personal and put on.” She usually oxidizes components of her designs for dramatic impact, and the surfaces of her items are rigorously polished to a flawless matte end.
Her profession has been deeply intertwined within the New York style world, which has given her the chance to expertise and be taught first-hand about clothes, equipment and jewellery produced for the last word buyer. Her items not solely fashion-forward and timeless but in addition can be found at a value prospects are prepared to pay.
Lisa has been within the jewellery world for 30 years. She studied style at Parson’s Faculty of Design earlier than working for a ladies’s sportswear firm. Finally, she grew bored with another person calling the photographs. She wrote a marketing strategy, and the sportswear firm provided to mortgage her start-up cash to launch a jewellery enterprise. The launch was a right away success—the jewellery thought-about “authentic, dramatic and tactile.”
When Lisa Jenks Designs was at its top, the corporate had 25 staff and an enormous presence within the style jewellery world. They exhibited at ENK, the Equipment Present, and Accent on Design and bought to essentially the most prestigious shops in the USA. They have been additionally featured in style magazines regularly.
Lisa has obtained quite a few awards, together with Designer of the 12 months (2006) from the Girls’s Jewellery Affiliation. She was additionally a finalist within the Worldwide DeBeers Diamond Jewellery Design competitors, and the Silver Institute chosen her as their “Worldwide Designer of Distinction.” She can also be a member of the distinguished Council of Trend Designers of America.
All of Lisa’s work is made in New York, both in her studio or by native subcontractors underneath her direct supervision. Lately, Lisa determined she didn’t wish to run an enormous enterprise and took a pair years off to contemplate her choices and targets. She got here again to jewellery with a renewed sense of what she needed to do. Her ideas have been to deliberately develop her enterprise smaller and to rediscover and revitalize her ardour for jewellery with the first aim of making talismans and charms.
When requested who she most admires, she responded instantly, “I drastically admire Ted Muehling. He’s somebody who simply did what he needed. He ignored style and did lovely work.”
