A collection of jewellery visually inspired by the Kingdom of Fungi.
The research for my Masters began with the topic of trend forecasting in Fashion, something I have been very interested in the last couple of years. What I found as a common subject in the past and years to come is the topic of sustainability, so I focussed on that as a subject.
While doing my research on sustainable brands and designers in this field I came across a few who were researching and working with mycelium based materials and thought this would be something interesting for myself to do more in depth research on. Mycelium, the fungal equivalent of roots in plants, has been identified as an ecologically friendly substitute to a litany of materials throughout different industries, including but not limited to packaging, fashion and building materials. The Kingdom of Fungi is something that has interested and amazed me for as long as I can remember so this was a perfect source of inspiration and path for me to take on. My initial idea was to use this material and make jewellery pieces with it, but as I did more research on the mycelium materials and got into contact with people working with and on this material, I found that it would be impossible to use this material on the small scale I needed to make the jewellery pieces wearable, which for me is a very important aspect of jewellery making.
After hitting a roadblock in my process, I had to make a shift in what I was doing, so I decided to move away from using fungi as the material inspiration for my jewellery pieces but rather now focus solely on the visual aspects of fungi to inspire and guide my design process. This collection is visually inspired by and designed around mushrooms and the underground interwoven mycelium network we as humans don’t get to see. With this collection I wanted to give the feeling that my jewellery is growing on you as you walk throw a forest and come into contact with the fungi.
I stayed true to my previous technical education while designing and manufacturing a collection of couture (occasion wear) and prêt-à-porter (everyday wear) jewellery pieces in traditional techniques and material (i.e. silver).