About Charlotte de Syllas

Charlotte De Syllas is acknowledged as one of the finest artist-jewellers working in Britain today. The prizes and honours she has been awarded include the prestigious Jerwood Prize for Jewellery in 1995, the Goldsmiths’ Company Award in 2007, and a major scholarship from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust in 1999.

Making one-off commissioned jewellery since 1966, Charlotte De Syllas has produced a portfolio of great originality and distinction. Each piece evolves from her own free designs to reflect the individuality of the client. Her collection thus presents a diversity of forms characterised by flowing lines and brilliant rainbow colours. The sculptural elegance of each piece tends, however, to mask the complexity of structure intrinsic to its design. A defining feature of her work, these intricate combinations of gemstone and metal are achieved through the ingenious, and highly innovative, three-dimensional approach that Charlotte De Syllas brings to the art of fine carving.

Colour is an essential element in each design, and it is her frank delight in the hue, the tone and the qualities of minerals, together with her fascination with organic forms of all kinds – a curling leaf, knotted stem, wings, fins, shells, indeed all things aquatic – that Charlotte De Syllas celebrates through her skills as a carver. But it is perhaps her inspired use of materials and the pursuit of extremes in shaping them, that sets her work apart: a unique synthesis of exquisite craftsmanship and daring creative vision. Her masterly handling of the intricate form has taken an ancient, traditional art and developed it into a remarkable – and remarkably modern – idiom.