There's a street I've walked a dozen times in a dozen different lights, and on this particular afternoon it did the thing it sometimes does — stopped being a street I was walking through and became, for about four seconds, a street I was actually looking at. Nothing dramatic. Just the low sun catching the plaster on the corner building until it turned the color of something you'd want to set in gold, and a shopfront sign swinging slightly on its bracket, and me reaching up without quite meaning to, touching my ear the way I do when I've noticed something before I've understood why. People imagine a jewelry designer's ideas start at a bench, under a loupe, with actual metal in hand. Almost none of mine do. Most of them start exactly like this — walking somewhere, not working, and being interrupted by a color or a shape that has nothing officially to do with jewelry at all.
I've gotten better, over the years, at not letting those four seconds pass without doing anything about them. There's always a small notebook somewhere on me — not a sketchbook, nothing that precious, just a plain one that's usually a little coffee-stained by the time I finish it. So the walk generally ends the same way: a table outside somewhere, a coffee I only half drink because it's gone cold by the time I remember it, and the notebook open to whatever page was next. What goes in there rarely looks like jewelry. It's a color, a proportion, sometimes just a word — "narrower," "that gold," "the way it caught" — the kind of note that would mean nothing to anyone else and occasionally means nothing to me either, three months later. I've made peace with that. Not every page is supposed to turn into something. I think that's actually the part that makes the ones that do feel earned.
What I didn't expect, when I started keeping these notebooks years ago, was how long the gap could be between the noticing and the using. There's a page from an old one — I still have it, tucked in a drawer I don't open often enough — with a quick, impatient little drawing of a chain link I'd seen holding a gate shut on a street much like that one. At the time it was just a shape I liked and couldn't explain. It sat there, unbothered, for the better part of a year, through two other projects and one design I abandoned entirely, before it turned, almost without my deciding it, into the paperclip-link chain that's become one of the pieces I'm proudest of. The bench didn't invent that shape. A gate did. The bench just finally got around to agreeing with it.
I don't say this to make the process sound more mystical than it is — most days it's just me, slightly late for wherever I was actually supposed to be, scribbling something illegible before the feeling passes. But I've stopped apologizing for how much of the work happens away from the studio, on a stool that isn't mine, over a coffee I've forgotten to drink. The bench is where a piece gets finished. It is almost never where a piece begins. That part happens out here, in the noticing, long before any of it has earned the right to be called a design — and I've come to think that gap, the unglamorous waiting between a street and a shape, is as much a part of what this brand actually is as anything I've ever made in metal.
— Arina
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